Confusion
by Ukaisha
Summary: Picking up the pieces is the hardest part, and in the end, life's really nothing more than an overly complicated jigsaw puzzle... Kousei POV, Takouji
1. Prologue

Disclaimer: The author takes absolutely no stake or claim on any characters mentioned.  
Warning: Shounen-ai, Inexplicit yaoi, mild swearing, detailed childbirth, drug usage.

A/N: It seems like in every story I read, Kousei is the bad guy. It's practically become fanon for him to be a jerk, a bastard, a drunk, an abusive father...  
Anyone else find this a little unfair? Maybe he wasn't such a bad guy at all. Maybe, like any dad, he made a few mistakes, and like any dad, he had to learn to deal with them.  
I say his character needs a nice, healthy, reformation.

Childbirth=Prologue. Meaning this chapter. If this is not your idea of a good opening to a story, just go ahead and skip to the body of the story, where it actually begins.  
Thanks.

Update: Got a commission done for Confusion:  
h t tp : / / ash flura . deviant art . com /gallery / #/ d4vm z72  
As usual, remove the spaces. More lovely Ashflura art |3

* * *

_Prologue_

I really didn't hate my son, and I never wished that I'd had another, or that I'd taken his brother instead. It's not like he was just some bad kid, life was just a little unfair to him; to both of us, really. I could never really control him; he was too wild, too rebellious. From the very start of his life I guess I should've known that this little guy was going to cause me a mess of trouble, but as a father, there wasn't a single reason to be had that would make me turn my back on him. I loved my son, and I still do, even now...  
I guess, like all stories, we have to start at the beginning. Or at least, we have to start at Kouji's beginning.

-

Marriages always start like the perfect dream. It always seems like everything in the world is so perfect and so wonderful and it's obvious that you were destined for each other, and never mind how different you two are as people. I don't think there could ever be two people more different than me and Tomoko, not ever.  
At first, we were the ideal couple in love. At least we were for two, maybe three years. Then it just...stopped. The dream disappeared. We just stopped being in love, can you imagine that?

I guess it's pretty common now, so maybe you can. Maybe I was naïve enough to think that love was just supposed to last for a great deal longer than two or three years, even if the two hated each other. After all, my parents are still married, and I don't think they've ever even liked each other.

It was unexpected. We weren't really KIDS when we got married and it hadn't been a snap decision. We were in our late twenties, and we'd been seeing each other for three years. We had careers, we had plans. We were pretty settled and we didn't really have money problems, aside from the usual tuition debts. After a few years of having a steady relationship, Tomoko found herself cutting things a bit close, so we moved in together. At first, that was like a dream. We were still very much in love and we loved being together. Then we started thinking, hey, we're intelligent adults who love each other, and we're living together anyway, so why not get married? It would surely be perfect, and besides, it was around time for us to think about settling down anyway. We never even thought we might divorce a few short years later; never even dreamed it. That kind of thing just didn't happen to mature adults in love, right? Stupid kids, maybe, but it wouldn't happen to us. WE were in love.

Well, it did happen, unfortunately. It turns out we weren't as truly in love as we thought, and after three years we were very close to hating each other. We couldn't bear being around one another; we found out, in the end, that we were just so much more different than we realized. We just argued over the stupidest things, we found ways to avoid each other as often as we could. It was the end, and deep down, we both knew that. Our friends and family even knew it. So why we waited so damn long to do something about it, I'll never know.

We had already fallen very out of love when we realized that Tomoko was carrying our child, and there wasn't anything we could do about it. An abortion was unacceptable; I know it's a common thing these days to just terminate unwanted pregnancies, but neither of us thought we could go through with it. We both grew up in the kind of household where that kind of thing was looked down upon, and besides, it was our child. Even if we hated each other, we couldn't hate the child.  
But at the same time we couldn't have this child together; not with us snapping at each other all the time. We wanted this child to be the perfect solution to our crumbling marriage, and we tried to pretend we could stay together if for nothing else but the baby, but even our unborn child couldn't persuade us to start loving each other again. There seemed to be no solution, none, except for one, miserable thing.

The divorce wasn't my idea; Tomoko brought it up. To this day, I don't know what on earth she was thinking. She already knew she was pregnant; hell, she was already almost four months along. Why on earth she'd want to cut out the father in her child's life is beyond me. I don't think I was such a bad husband, and I don't think I'd have made such a bad father...  
But truthfully, and even I'd admit it, Tomoko and I could not take marriage anymore. We barely liked each other. Each of us had somehow evolved into a person with qualities that neither of us could stand. We didn't even want to live together, even talk to each other. Days would go by with us just walking around each other, pretending we weren't there. I could pretend that a baby would solve all of our problems, but in reality an infant would make them ten times worse. Tomoko knew that, and she wasn't selfish enough to put a child through all that pain.

The decision was short and sweet; it was better for us and for the child that we do it while we could still be civil to each other. Neither of us wanted to become the married couple who argued nonstop in front of an impressionable child, as though it were normal. My own parents were always fighting with each other; I knew how much it could hurt. We would rather the child grew up in a calm environment with only one parent rather than a war-zone with two.  
I still wanted partial custody of the child. I was not going to let it escape out of my life, and I was not going to just disappear, and cut off all ties with Tomoko. I made it clear I was going to help support the baby, even if we weren't married. I knew with our country's stupid custody system it'd be a little hard, but Tomoko was going to work with me. She'd let me be there watching our child grow up.  
And then, there were two.

Suddenly, there were two babies. Tomoko and I saw them for the first time together on the ultrasound. We were both fluttering with anticipation to see our baby looking actually like a baby for the first time, and we couldn't wait to see that little head. Imagine our shock and surprise when we looked up on the screen, and there were _two_ little heads. Twins; identical twins, it turned out. Boys, both of them, and healthy boys too. MY boys. My SONS.  
And as I realized that Tomoko was already very pregnant, I realized that I WANTED my boys, because it was something totally profound to me. They were MY children. I couldn't let them go like that.  
The divorce was already underway; it was just about to be finalized. I asked her, could it be terminated? Maybe we could work our marriage out. It wasn't that bad to begin with; we just weren't as in love as we used to be. Maybe that wasn't such a big deal; maybe we didn't have to be in love. As long as we could just _tolerate _each other, why not stay married? It wouldn't hurt anything…

Tomoko said that it would be fine; there was no reason we couldn't just go through with the plan, and share custody of the babies. If I could support one, I could support two. Nothing has changed, she said. We still don't love each other, and we never will reconcile our petty differences. We weren't young love-birds anymore, and we never would be again, no matter what our hopes or dreams were. It was in all of our best interests, the twins included, to finalize the divorce. We had to be adults and make the adult decision in the best interests of the boys. Staying together and hating each other was not the answer.  
She was right, of course, and she was thinking more clearly than I was. It was one reason I'd fallen in love with her in the first place; she was always so steadfast with her decisions, and even though I'd stop and go back and think over all the other possibilities and second guess myself, she'd always know the right answer in the end. I was still thinking of myself; she was still thinking of the boys.

Ah, my boys. Sometimes it's just still so profound to me to realize you've created life.  
I reasoned that I couldn't let my sudden obsession with children get in the way of logic, and the logical thing was to go through with the divorce. We weren't fighting over money or equity or anything stupid like that, so it was all going smoothly and quickly. I didn't need to be the bump in the road to stop all of that; we just needed to get on with it.  
We did. Then came the nightmare.

Twins are notorious for coming too early, and having the mother descend into labor long before they're ready to come out. My pair was no different. They were just barely seven months along when they decided to come toppling into the world, in a most unpleasant way.  
Tomoko wanted to give birth naturally; it was important to her. We were already apart and living in separate houses, but the minute the real labor started, (the real thing for sure, not fake labor) I was the one she called to drive her to the hospital. The contractions before labor usually last hours and sometimes all day. We figured: no problem. Plenty of time to get to the hospital.  
Just like our rotten luck, her water broke some time during the car ride. Then she started crying, and just wailing about the pain she was in, and she begged God to let it stop. I've never given birth, obviously, but I was positive that something was very wrong.  
And I was very right.  
Her cervix wouldn't dilate properly. There was apparently an issue with one of the twins, who was facing in the wrong direction. Babies should be born headfirst, they say, not feet first, because complications could occur. Worst of all, Tomoko was bleeding, and the birth hadn't even happened yet. This was apparently a very, very bad sign.  
The doctor had something to give her to force her to dilate, but they were afraid it wouldn't be enough. They wanted to do a caesarean section; she insisted on natural birth. They could give her an epidural, but there was no time for it to take effect. She was already IN labor, and the babies were coming NOW.

So my wife, my ex-wife, the stubborn old broad that she was, ended up in labor, delivering twins way too early, bleeding, and giving natural vaginal birth, with one of them facing the wrong way, without an epidural.  
I've heard horror stories about painful births, but this one deserved some kind of award.

Fathers weren't typically allowed in the delivery room at the time, but I was allowed in, just to calm her down. She was freaking out. We had waited until our thirties to have children, which they say is the ideal child-bearing time, but Tomoko, simply could not bear the pain, and suddenly her best interests were at the top, not the boys'. She begged for anything to stop the pain; doctors told her anything but an epidural would probably hurt the babies, and she screamed that she didn't care. She yelled that she wanted these "things" out of her, as if they were just terrible burdens, not two innocent babies.  
They told her to push. She did. Blood pooled out. She breathed. She pushed. There was more blood. They cleaned it up. She pushed.  
Then one of them crowned, the one who was facing the right way. All of a sudden, a split second later, it was out. HE was out. My first son was born! There was stuff and blood all over him, but there he was: my first child! And I heard him cry for the first time...! Oh, I wanted to cry with him, really I did.  
And then he disappeared. I only really got a glimpse of him before someone scurried him out of the way and temporarily out of mind. Now to worry about the second one.

Babies aren't usually born breech, that is, with their legs coming out first. Gynecologists are supposed to notice this type of thing and perform procedures to turn the baby the RIGHT way around. For some reason, this wasn't done, which made life much harder for us and the doctors.  
In the event that the position is not corrected, breech babies are usually delivered by C-section because it's extremely difficult to deliver one safely, and it's particularly stressful for the mother. Tomoko did not have time for a C-section, and so all we could do was pray for the best. The first one was okay; with a little luck, maybe the second one would be too.  
She was given oxygen and she was being treated for shock. They were trying to coerce the baby out, and slowly, he came, feet first, with Tomoko sobbing and wailing all the while. It felt like it took forever for him to emerge, and I was panicking; what if he suffocated before they got him out? What if he choked on all the blood? Almost all of him was out except for the head, the most IMPORTANT part...  
His head suddenly popped out, and for the second time in five minutes, I became a father. He didn't do anything for a few long seconds; they felt like forever to me. He didn't move and he didn't make any noise. His mouth and nose were cleaned out and I couldn't even watch as they tried to get him to make some indication that he was alive. He couldn't be dead, couldn't be stillborn..  
Then I heard him make a little gurgling noise. He breathed. He cried.  
He was alive.  
At this point I finally cried. Not very loudly or obnoxiously or anything, but there were tears.

We didn't get to see them again for a long time because they were undergoing a lot of additional treatment to ensure they would survive. The twins were exceptionally small, due to being so premature, and their lungs weren't fully developed. They were extremely susceptible to bacteria, and we weren't allowed to hold them at first. They looked a little sickly when I got a glimpse of them the next time.  
But they were alive.

Tomoko continued bleeding after the placenta came through. She nearly hemorrhaged to death, but thank God; they got the bleeding under control. She was stabilized. She successfully delivered the twins and did not die in childbirth. However, it was very, very unlikely that she would take another pregnancy very well. Consequences could be disastrous. Although we were no longer married, and no longer having sex, she decided to get her tubes tied so that there would be no threat of pregnancy ever again. Why would she ever need to be pregnant again, now that we already had two beautiful babies? And maybe would get back together...?  
She was conscious and moving around on their second day. We held them together, first one, and then the other. We forgot our stupid differences and we smiled at each other, cooing over our children, as if we were just happy parents in love.

She agreed to give them my name, Kou, the one that used the character for "happiness," and sometimes "luck." Call it egotistical; I just wanted my boys to at least start off well in life after their near-tragic birth. An encouraging name helped. She concured.

I might have chosen creative endings had I given more thought to it, but instead just stuck with "ichi" and "ji," for the first and second born, respectively.  
Kouichi and Kouji: my first and only sons.

It was a little over a week before Tomoko was allowed to go home, and a little more than two weeks before the twins were considered healthy enough to be brought home. They'd gotten ill in their first week, which is what caused the delay, but the infection cleared up without much fuss and we received them in good health, and in good spirits. Or at least, spirited. They moved around and cried just about the whole ride home.

I practically moved back in with Tomoko to help take care of the babies, who were a handful, as babies usually are. Already, they seemed to have their own personalities. Kouichi liked feeding time, and Kouji couldn't stand it. Kouji could usually sleep through the night, and Kouichi woke up every half hour. Kouichi slept on his back, and Kouji slept on his stomach. It was delightful to watch them move around and exist in completely different ways, even though they were twins.  
It was amusing even to try and tell them apart for the first few days; we'd had to keep their bracelets from the hospital on to be sure we wouldn't mix them up. Tomoko figured out who was who faster than I did, and soon didn't even hesitate when it came to finding one or the other. Call it a mother's instinct, I guess.

I'm still not sure how, but I was eventually able to figure out which one was Kouji specifically, so when I needed to tell them apart, I found Kouji first.

For the first two or three weeks, everything was great. Tomoko was an amazing mother and no lack of sleep seemed to deter her from caring and loving for her children. She was even remarkably pleasant to me, and I was extremely grateful that even if I had married a woman I couldn't stand, at least she was a competent mother.

The twins were not so grateful to their exhausted mother. They were very demanding and very finicky. They cried an awful lot. I could tell the constant crying was extremely stressful to Tomoko, and in return, it was stressing me. I cringed every time the twins cried, knowing that in another room somewhere, Tomoko was cursing them.

As per usual, Tomoko decided to be stubborn and wanted to strictly breast feed the twins, but she was having trouble producing enough milk to feed both of them as often as was necessary, especially with their low birth weight to account for. Tomoko breast fed them in the morning and afternoon, and at night, I formula fed them. After a few more weeks, I was usually the one to change their diapers, and often the one to bathe them. Frankly, I became their primary caretaker.

I eventually realized that Tomoko suffered from post-partum depression, and she got hit with it hard. I knew that she was a great mother; really. I just didn't think she could BE a mother with her depression stifling her like this. There were times she didn't even want to look at the twins, and she let me tend to them all day. Then there were times where she could hardly stand to let them go, and she couldn't let them out of her sight for a minute. Then she started getting worse. She either slept too much or not at all. She either went days without eating or binged all in one sitting. She cried a lot. It worried me.

Tomoko suddenly realized that she didn't want me around anymore. She abruptly reminded me that we had divorced, and out I went. There was shit I could do about it; back then and even now, custody in all divorce cases usually went to the mother, and the father had no right to demand to see his children if the mother did not want him to.

She grew very jealous of the twins, never allowing me see them, just to keep them to herself. Sometimes she favored one over the other, and while she fawned happily over one twin, the other would be left alone in his crib, forgotten. She changed her favorite every time. She jumped back and forth; these were HER babies, and don't you forget it, and she smothered them with love. And then she would leave them in their cribs for hours, ignoring them completely, no matter how loud they cried.  
It scared me.

When they were only six months old, I hired the best damn lawyer I could find and I filed for legal custody of both Kouichi and Kouji, who at the time, in exchange for being named by me, were both given the surname "Kimura," Tomoko's previous family name. I wanted to take both twins, change their names to Minamoto, and take care of them myself. I wanted to get them the hell out of there before Tomoko unintentionally became abusive. I couldn't let the whole "babies belong with their mothers" issue ruin my boys' lives.

My defense was that Tomoko was not a fit mother because of her depression and that she could not care for the babies like a sound mother should. She also had a lower rate job than I did, and it was ludicrous to imagine her actually raising two children on her own. She would simply never pull it off; she would neglect them at some point, and possibly fail to feed them. I showed evidence that she was already possibly neglecting them and that her current treatment of the two bordered on abuse. Her own mother testified on my behalf; even she saw how wrong it all was, namely because she, the grandmother in the whole bother, had to baby-sit them more often than not.  
My argument was clean-cut, precise, and to the point, and it was perhaps a little too perfect. Here's this guy trying to take two little babies away from their mother forever, and this poor woman, crying her eyes out, barely able to sob that she WAS a good mother and she wanted her babies to be _her _babies. It's a sexist world out there; people want children to be with their mothers, no matter how unfit, and from the start, I knew I was fighting a losing battle.  
Our "joint custody" agreement was very far gone. I don't think we had a civil word to say to each other for months.

The end was bittersweet. The judge saw it this way. There were two children, and two parents. Both parents want to keep both children, and this was a unique case where the mother might not exactly be the best choice. His solution was to split the children up, and to have one parent take one twin, and the second parent take the other. There was enough evidence to support that Tomoko could raise one child, but he agreed: two was out of her reach. He declared her a fit mother who did not deserve to have her babies taken away from her for no apparent reason. Ironically, though she was branded "mentally sound," she was ordered to seek out counseling.  
I was appalled that he came to this decision. How could we split the twins up? They were...well...TWINS. They were brothers. Even if we worked something out and they saw each other every single day, it just wasn't right. Twin brothers belonged together. They were special.  
But that was the deal; take it or leave it. I can have one son, or neither. It was the hardest decision of my life, and I wasn't even given a choice.

Truthfully, I was grateful to even have the option of one. I'd been partly expecting to never see my sons again. At least I could protect one son.

Kouichi was a relatively healthy baby, and he was much quieter than Kouji. He didn't cry as much and he didn't fuss, and he'd switched his nightly routine with Kouji's. Now he slept nicely through the night, and Kouji was up every half hour. I figured that if Tomoko had to have one of the twins, it should be the one that would be easiest for her to care for, so she wouldn't blame it for her problems. However, and it's kind of embarrassing to admit, but I was kind of sad that I wasn't going to be raising my firstborn son... in the end though, none of that really mattered.

Kouji was a lively child, even if he was born second and smallest. He made a lot of noise and created a lot of problems, and even now, he still had a bad habit of refusing milk. Personally, I guess I was a little more attached to him; he was the first son I'd gotten to hold, and I'd always known him over his brother…

I expected to have to get into some big argument about which child went where, but Tomoko was incredibly accepting when I suggested that I took Kouji. Evidently she had her own reasons for wanting custody of Kouichi; to this day I'm not sure if her reason was because he was easier to care for, or if there was some other hidden reason. Maybe he was just her favorite at that particular time, for whatever reason.

Tomoko and I agreed on the split. As long as she was guaranteed full custody of Kouichi, I was guaranteed full custody of Kouji. When the decision was made, she was unfazed, but when it actually came to taking Kouji away, she wept and sobbed and hugged him like he was being sentenced to death. She could barely let go of him; I think she was ready to fight so that she wouldn't have to.  
Don't get me wrong; the woman was a fiercely protective and loving mother…when she wasn't feeling so depressed. Thankfully, I got Kouji out of there without an incident.  
Kouichi and Kouji were one year old when they were separated, and they were only just beginning to acknowledge that they existed together. Their goodbye consisted of Kouji poking Kouichi in the eye as he was picked up, and for Kouichi to begin bawling.  
I wonder to this day if from that day on, they'd ever realized there was someone missing.

I had taken a job in Sapporo to get away from Tokyo. Although neither of us really said it, we decided on our own unofficial agreement. We would not keep in touch. We would not let the twins know they were twins. If we could help it, for as long as we could, we would live separate lives, and avoid telling each child that their other parent was easily reached.  
I almost legally had Kouji's second character changed to another variation of "ji" so that he wouldn't question why he was the "second son," but I didn't. I couldn't justify it. It didn't seem right somehow, like if I'd done that, I wouldn't be acknowledging that I had a first son out there.  
I didn't even know if I would ever see Kouichi again, but he was still my first born son, and I would always remember that. I'd asked Tomoko to send me pictures of him as he grew up; I didn't know if she would do it or not, since when I asked she joked (I think she was joking, anyway...her sense of humor is a little more skewed than mine) she told me if I wanted to see Kouichi I just had to look at Kouji.  
I was pretty sure her mother would though. Her mother liked me still for some reason.

Anyway, I did legally have Kouji family name listed as Minamoto before I left the city. Afterwards, I left my ex-wife, along with Kouichi, my first son, behind, possibly to never see them again. For a long time, they simply dropped off the face of the earth, ceasing to exist altogether except every three or four years, where I'd receive a picture of my first born son. And that was all I ever knew of him.

And thus, Minamoto Kouji became my only son; he became my entire world. He was all I had. I became a single father to a developing infant, never to truly know what would lie ahead in the future until it all continued to go downhill.  
Perhaps I _should _have modified Kouji's name, and instead chosen to rename him entirely, instead calling him "bad luck."


	2. Confusion

Kouji made it clear he was not a perfectly normal baby by the time he was two. Kouichi was already starting to learn sounds and the beginnings of words when I left him, but Kouji remained blissfully word free. He got his point across by crying and screaming. He was a toddler, and he still acted like a helpless little baby. He couldn't walk, and he still wore baby diapers, which he was quickly growing too big for. He lashed out at me and at other people; he was inexplicably violent for a two year old.  
And he wouldn't talk.

Because he was far too young to be resentful that he didn't have his mother, I suspected his behavioral problems stemmed from some sort of mental or God forbid, genetic defect, and by the time he was three he'd been screened for every possibility known to man.  
Autism came up once or twice, and several times that was the diagnosis, for lack of anything better to provide. But that can't be! said others. Autistic children could talk, could think; they weren't stupid. Autism was (most likely) a genetic disorder, and if Kouji had it, Kouichi would have it. Plus, Kouji didn't exhibit the passionate need for a daily ritual and for everything to always be the same, which was one key identifying factor in Autism.

Some recommended childhood schizophrenia. Others Down Syndrome. Some just said he was retarded. Maybe he was autistic AND retarded. Or maybe he had autistic schizophrenia. Or maybe maybe maybe. No one knew! He wasn't developing like a normal child, he had a bad habit of hurting himself, and while he hadn't learned to talk yet, he frequently had temper tantrums that could spiral wildly out of control, and nothing I did or said could calm him. Maybe he was deaf. Maybe he was just faking it.  
Maybe, maybe, maybe.  
Wrong, wrong, wrong. All of these suggestions were WRONG. Sound tests met with quick results; Kouji screamed and clapped his hands over his ears, shouting in his own, wordless way that the sound was too loud. He was not deaf. He most certainly was not faking it; a young child couldn't put on a ruse this long. His case was too severe to be Down Syndrome, and he didn't have any...disfigurement. It wasn't Autism. It wasn't schizophrenia. It wasn't _anything_...even mental retardation couldn't explain his silence, or how _aware _he was. But what else was there?

He wasn't interested in fun toys and amusing child shows; he stayed in his room and put together puzzles. That was the only thing I knew my son liked: puzzles. I didn't know his favorite color or his favorite television show (not that he even liked television) or his favorite anything; I couldn't even tell you what his favorite food was, because he didn't WANT to eat. He ate when he was about to pass out from starvation, and that was that.  
I secretly blamed this problem from his being suddenly cut off from breast milk rather than gradually weaned off of it, as though his problems really did stem from being taken away from his mother, but even then, I knew he'd always had a problem with eating.

But if there was one, single thing I knew my son liked, it was puzzles. He would waddle up to me, (three years old and only just learning to walk!) and helplessly tug on my clothes, begging for more puzzles to solve even though he was barely able to stand. He was like a baby just taking his first steps instead of a child who should very well be outside running around and chattering up a storm, playing games with other children. None of _that _was for Kouji; he seemed to have the mental capacity of a year old baby, except for his puzzles.  
First he liked the ones meant for toddlers, maybe with twenty pieces to the whole thing. But after four years of age, he was putting together massive jigsaw puzzles that would've taken _me _days to complete, and he did it in a few hours.  
I KNEW he was smart...I just didn't know how to bring it out of him.

Psychiatrists tested his intelligence with extremely primitive tests, such as pointing out a red triangle amongst two red circles. Kouji was quick to establish colors and patterns, but he didn't really seem to get words, or connected concepts and ideas. He couldn't connect a picture to another relevant one, such as a cow belonging in a barn, which is usually obvious to children by age two. It absolutely frustrated him to where he didn't even try after a few short tests.  
It's impossible to really gauge a young child's IQ, but a diligent program of psychiatrists dedicated to child psychology developed a test for children five and under, during which a projected IQ would be established. It was accurate within 10 points by the child's eighteenth birthday, 95% of the time. His was frighteningly low.  
All had low hopes that it would ever get better.

Still, he never talked. He made strange sounds, but he never talked. Still there was no solid answer, and the only thing that popped up legitimately more than once was severe mental retardation combined with high-functioning Autism. It was horrible for a single father to learn this about his son; even worse, I imagine, for a single mother. I dreaded hearing Tomoko finally stepping up and begging for help to take care of Kouichi, who, as Kouji's identical twin, almost surely had the same problems, which I knew from experience would get expensive. The call never came. Either miraculously, he'd escaped this horrible prison Kouji was trapped in, or she was too damn proud to admit it. Even the one picture I received didn't come with any kind of indication that there was anything wrong with him.  
Doctors also told me it was possibly just a complication from birth. It's possible that Kouji hadn't gotten enough oxygen when he came out or he'd been choked with the umbilical chord and hadn't been untied in time, or maybe a doctor got careless and dropped him a little. It could've been a million things, all made more and more likely by the fact that he was born breech during a complicated birth. You never really realize how easy it is to completely ruin a little baby. It was just bad luck that I got the damaged son.  
I thought that once, and almost smacked myself immediately afterwards. Even with all of his problems, I loved my son. No matter what; mental hindrances or not.

Kouji never attended preschool and it was unlikely he would attend kindergarten. It was becoming unlikely that he would even attend grade school. I tried to teach him myself, but he didn't want to learn, just like he didn't want to talk. He cried when I tried; he kicked and screamed when I tried to teach him ANYTHING that didn't involve shapes and colors. I read to him often because I'd heard that reading to children can increase their mental capacity, especially when younger. He barely even listened, like the words were just meaningless sounds and meant nothing to him.  
He did like pictures. God, did he love pictures. He'd often pointed to pictures of dogs, and he made anxious, pleading noises; he wanted a dog, he said in his own way, and I tried to tell him the best I could that he couldn't have one. He didn't understand. All he knew is that he wanted a dog, and he wasn't getting one. He cried; he hid from me when I tried to comfort him. He flat out refused to make eye contact with me. He kicked me in more places I could count. He bit me and grunted and then fled away on all fours, like an animal.  
It was hard to call him spoiled, but it was harder to refuse something he wanted, because he didn't _understand_ why he wasn't getting what he wanted. I couldn't yell at him; I couldn't scold him for being wild. How can you punish a child who doesn't understand what he did was wrong?

It was possibly the most pathetic period of my life. I loved my son, but I regretted that of all children, it had to be him. I'd had such high hopes for my son; not unreasonable expectations, I don't think, but just hopes about raising him and him growing up and shaping him to be a good person. Deep down I knew Kouji was brilliant; a genius waiting to happen; he was just...missing a few screws, I guess. Kouji wasn't even given a chance to shine, when he could probably outshine them all.  
I cried myself to sleep more often than not, and Kouji, at least, understood tears. When he saw me crying, he pulled himself onto my lap and used his tiny hands to awkwardly wipe away my tears, looking very concerned, very aware. He understood that tears meant you were sad.  
He knew because of how often he shed them himself.

Kouji was five years old when something incredible happened. I can honestly say that it was the best day of my life when, as I sat at the kitchen table reading the paper, Kouji suddenly came into the kitchen, walking surely, not teetering around like a weak little baby. He pulled himself up into a chair without any problems. I was completely surprised; Kouji usually needed me to pick him up and put him in a chair, usually as I received several screams in my ear in protest.  
I watched him, amazed, as he cupped his hands neatly on the table, made eye contact with me, and said in a clear, pure voice: "Daddy, can I have some orange juice?"  
I swear to God, at that moment, I just completely broke down and started bawling like a baby.

No one could really explain it, but Kouji suddenly began talking on his own. Now that he had a way to express himself, his temper tantrums were cut in half, and eventually disappeared all together. Kouji's projected IQ jumped about forty points, and kept going up. Signs of Autism and mental retardation and schizophrenia...gone. Just gone. By all standards, Kouji was a normal boy. A little bit slow for his age maybe, but he was just...normal.  
"Some children just grow more slowly than others," weakly suggested one psychiatrist, who had nothing intelligent or useful to say otherwise.

This was no longer true for Kouji. I taught him the basics of spelling, grammar...he was fascinated by language. He'd been picking up a lot more than I realized, and I knew that I'd done one thing right, if nothing else. Most parents just shout at their child repetitively when they think they can't understand them; I always had spoken to Kouji as if he were keenly listening to every word I said. He talked like I did; his words and his language were reflecting mine. Everything I'd ever said to him was suddenly being echoed back to me, perfectly. I could hardly believe it when he started using phrases that I used, comprehending their meaning far too intimately for a five year old, and he even used _ore_, rather than _boku,_ because it's what he'd heard me use.  
How did Kouji understand now when all his life, comprehension always seemed just out of his reach?  
He DID understand. He understood so much more than I'd ever known.

Kouji was held back a year because of his unique circumstances, not because he wasn't smart enough to be in the next grade up. It just seemed like too much to throw on him all at once; he needed a little while to absorb normal life. When he was eight years old, he entered the first grade like any normal child, even if he was a little older. He was extremely shy, and extremely unhappy to be away from home, but instead of throwing a tantrum, as I'd been expecting, he was quiet and obedient throughout the entire day.

Once or twice throughout the year I got phone calls about bad behavior, but at least a dozen people who saw him every day knew his story; they took everything he did with a grain of salt, knowing it was a miracle that he was doing it at all.

Kouji was still far from a normal boy, but after five years of hell, everything he did that even slightly pointed him in the direction of normalcy was wonderful. I stopped taking him to his psychiatrists; I stopped getting him evaluated. Nothing was wrong with my son. He'd just grown a little slowly, that's all.

Kouji grew. His vocabulary was extensive; his understanding of words and their most obscure meanings was deep. He still had a fascination for puzzles, and he would still rather spend hours putting together a three thousand piece jigsaw than watch a television show or a movie. The only movie he liked was The Lion King; he said he liked the songs. He liked to sing them, and to my surprise, he had amazing control over his vocal chords when it came to varying pitch.  
He didn't care for sports, but he took voice control lessons, and then entered his school's chorus as one of the youngest and, if I may be so proud, one of the best singers there. His voice was well developed for an eight year old who'd never spent much of his life talking, and he was rarely off-pitch. But he was critical of himself, and this was the only thing that bothered me. Once, after a performance, I'd gone to hug him and congratulate him for doing a good job when he suddenly came running into my arms, crying.  
"What's wrong?" I asked, very alarmed.  
"I...I messed up an entire line. I was off-note the entire line. I was singing alto and I should've been singing soprano. I was the main treble, and I blew it." It was worrisome that Kouji was so disturbed by a single mistake, but I still was grateful that this was his biggest worry. If my son was a bit of a perfectionist, that was nothing to be concerned about; I thought it was a quality to praise.

Eventually, we figured out that it was hard for Kouji to achieve soprano at all anymore. He was pretty much stuck at tenor, and it was because, surprisingly, his voice was changing. It became clear just a few months before his tenth birthday that he was starting puberty obscenely early, despite "growing" slow. This crushed him; he hated his new voice, and as much as I tried to convince him that he still sounded fine, he quit singing all together. For a while he refused to talk because he couldn't stand the voice that came out, (you can only imagine how much this frightened me) but after a while, he got bored of not talking. He had an active mind, and saying nothing was extremely boring to him.  
Again, this sudden self-loathing was extremely alarming, but I quickly found out that it didn't hinder him much after he quit singing. He was more interested in other things anyway, like what was going on with his body. Awkwardly, I found out that barely five years after teaching my son how to talk, I now had to teach him about sex, reproduction, and actually growing up. Abruptly my child was becoming an adult, a man, and I couldn't even believe it was already happening. In a few short years he'd start thinking about _college_. Jesus. Where did the years disappear to? It seemed like one day I had this tiny little baby and then all of a sudden I had a young man. Kouji was my troublesome infant and then he was my rapidly maturing teenager.

They do grow up so fast, and in Kouji's case, exceptionally fast. I wish my childhood had gone by that fast sometimes; it felt like it took forever and a day.

And just to add to the strain, I took up another position at my job, and I was transferred back to the Kanto region, to Shibuya. Not only was my poor son undergoing ridiculously early puberty, but he'd have to do it in a school of strangers.  
Tomoko was very nearby, but after bothering her mother a little, I figured out what school Kouichi went to. Turns out he was a normal kid, just like Kouji was now, and he had no kind of mental problems. They weren't very well off, but at the same time I didn't think they were doing too badly. Tomoko never bothered me for money or anything, and as far as I knew Kouichi didn't know I existed, let alone that Kouji existed.

I just figured out how to avoid letting them meet. I would not admit to my son I had lied to him; his current stress was bad enough.  
This was about the time I stopped getting pictures of Kouichi. Not long after I moved back, Tomoko's mother died. I actually didn't learn this for several years; I just knew it was suddenly impossible for me to get in contact with her and, therefore, obtain any new information about my son.

Kouji had grown up completely used to the fact that he didn't have a mother, and I'm ashamed to admit that I never told him about the divorce, or even his own twin. It just seemed like so much to pile on him over everything else he'd been going through at the time, and I knew that after discovering his ordeal, Tomoko would want to see him and...I was selfish.  
I wanted to keep Kouji close to me, all to myself, and to never let anyone ever touch him; the ultimate over-protective parent. Kouji was MY son. I was the one who stuck by him all those horrible years, and I was the one who'd cared for him; who'd never let go of hope for him. I just didn't want to share him with anyone, anyone at all, so I avoided bringing up the fact that was likely a very obvious point to my son: he did not have a mother.  
He didn't like to play in parks for the most part, but he did like to swing, so I brought him there on occasion, just for a few minutes. It was painfully clear to me that he noticed almost every single child there had a mother with them, except for him. Even as he was swinging, I knew he was occupied with the mothers, staring at them from the moment we entered the park until the moment we left. I eventually stopped offering to bring him to parks when I realized he was mostly going just to watch other children interact with their mothers.

And when Kouji just said to me one day, very plainly, when he was seven years old: "Mother is dead, isn't she?" I just said yes, because I wanted it to be that simple. He asked how. Off the top of my head, I said a car crash. He said okay. He never questioned it and he didn't ask for more details; he didn't want to sit down and talk about it when I offered. He never even really wanted to go visit a gravesite. It never concerned him or caused him despair, although that very Christmas, one of his letters to Santa said that he secretly wished more than anything that he had a mother, but hoped his real mother was safe in Heaven. There were tear-streaks on it.

He did request a photograph, and I gave him one. I was never able to figure out what he did with it until years later, when I discovered that he slept with it under his pillow.

Sometimes I think back and wonder if it was his lacking a mother that made everything go so bad, but he never really told me. He just never really talked about his mother because she just wasn't there. I was his mother and father and the two of us were the closest thing we had to a family, and that was that.  
I never intended to lie to my son; it just sort of happened, and it all ended up sort of conveniently. Kouji just took me at my word and all of a sudden, I had no more explanations to give; none of the hard, difficult talks about divorce and his brother and why we never saw them; gone was all the mature subjects too complex for a child to understand that I thought I'd have to bring up sooner or later. I knew it would bite me in the ass one day, but for now, this was what I could handle. I guess I was pretending that if I kept this skeleton hidden in the closet deep enough, no one would ever find out.

Beside all that, Kouji was a tough, absorbent little kid, and he took everything in stride. He'd always been a bit of a loner, but I saw him interacting with children normally, and it seemed he actually enjoyed school now. We finally convinced the School Board to let him skip the third grade to place him with his normal age group. It wasn't fair to keep him with children so below his level because he'd been a little slow to mature, and even when he skipped to a normal grade for his age, he STILL seemed to be brighter than his peers.  
I thought it was important that he be able to relate to his peers, especially since he'd started puberty early. He didn't mind that he was the only boy in his grade to understand what "semen" was, and hair was no problem; at the start of fourth grade, I watched him show his arms, which were just beginning to grow in soft hair, to another boy. "See? Having hairy arms means you're going to be a real man!" He was very proud of becoming a man. It wasn't awkward for him at all.  
Of course, after he received the response: "Does that mean if we shaved your arms, you'd be a real woman?" he stopped showing it off.

Kouji once came home after school, and he rushed into his room. Actions like this always deeply concerned me, and while I gave him his space for a few minutes, I just had to go in and see what was wrong. Pungent memories of sobbing, uncontrollable little boys were hard to forget. Every single time he had a bad day and with every single tear he shed, I was slapped in the face with more memories than I could possibly recant here. Always, I feared that Kouji would somehow regress into that miserable little boy, who couldn't say a word.  
He was on his bed, rubbing his face into his pillow, and making happy sounds. He was blushing, and he was grinning. I asked him what was wrong.  
"Nothing's wrong," he said, very giddy. "I think I have a crush on someone." He was smiling so brilliantly, so perfectly; even if he was missing one of his canines. Something this NORMAL nearly made me faint, and seeing him so happy over something so silly just filled me with joy.  
"Who is it?" I asked, and he hid his face in his pillow again.  
"It's a secret," he told me cryptically. He jumped out of bed, jumped around for a minute, and then jumped back in, laughing. It made me so happy to see him this way. It was a little childish for his age, I'll admit, but for the first five years of his life, he barely counted as a child. It was good he could make up the years, right?

He took little cakes and extra large lunch portions to school to give to this crush, and I saw him stop at neighboring gardens and pick flowers. I didn't think twice about it; as far as I was concerned, it was wonderful that a nine year old was in love. Every day he would come home so happy, so filled with air; I caught him skipping once. It was adorable, if I can even use that word to describe it. Every day I'd ask him if he could tell me who his crush was NOW, and he still wouldn't; he'd just smile and wink and say it was a secret.  
Life was good. I had a wonderfully normal son, and I was personally seeing my own crush, a lovely woman named Satomi who I was even considering marrying now that everything was so NORMAL. I was doing well at my job, and life was just good.  
The conversation that ruined all that came shortly after Kouji's tenth birthday.

"Can I invite someone over for the night?" he asked innocently. He was sitting at the table as he always did, his hands cupped neatly and his feet swinging under the table while I cooked. Even at ten years old, an age where he should have started developing some seriousness, he still acted like a child. Even if he was becoming a man, he didn't want to let go of the child in him. I didn't mind at all; I still liked having a child, not a teenager.  
"That depends. Who is this someone?" Kouji hid his face and he made a little happy noise, and he finally squeaked out:  
"My crush."  
"Oh-ho, but your crush is a stranger. You know what I've always told you about letting strangers into the house."  
"But this person's not a stranger to ME," he said slyly.  
"If I don't know them, it's a stranger."  
"But you let people you know in the house all the time, and _I _don't know them!" Sometimes Kouji's reasoning skills amazed me. He'd make a damn fine lawyer. Never having even met his mother, he was turning out a lot like her, not just in looks (though he was starting to look like I hadn't contributed to his genes at all) but namely in personality and mentality. I found that pretty funny; in the end, it was even more hilarious considering how his mother and I had ended up.

"Just give me a name; just one little name," I insisted. Kouji thought hard about it; he was still contemplating deeply when I set his dinner in front of him.  
"If I tell you, you'll let me invite them over?"  
"Of course, as long as her parents are fine with this." Six and seven year olds having sleepovers with the opposite sex wasn't a big deal, but ten was practically approaching teendom, and I wasn't sure if the fact that Kouji was undergoing puberty made him take a bigger hit. I trusted him alone with a little girl; in this day and age, I wasn't sure what other parents would think.  
He bit his lip, and said slowly, "They say it's fine."  
"And the name?"  
He paused again. He had his mouth in a set position, just about to say the name, but he was catching it on his tongue over and over again.  
"T-t...Ta...Ta..."  
"Go ahead," I encouraged. At this point, I was feeling pretty good, even a little excited to finally hear this mystery crush's name.  
He took a deep breath, and finally, in a whoosh of air, he said very loudly: "Takuya."  
I stared at him quizzically for a moment. He was staring just as intently at me, sort of innocently blinking.  
"Is that a nickname?" Girls were sometimes major tomboys in this age; I figured a girl went by this name to make herself seem tougher.  
"No, it's a real name." I still wasn't really absorbing it; I still wasn't really accepting it. I tried one last time to get the name straight.  
"But Kouji, 'Takuya' is a boy's name."  
I remember very clearly how bright and aware his eyes were as he stared at me, straight on. I remember how confidently and how surely he said: "I know; Takuya is a boy."  
And thus, for the second time in his young life, Kouji changed the course of our relationship forever with just a single, measly sentence.

I didn't really know what to say. Since the dawn of time I'd made it clear to Kouji that boys belonged with GIRLS, not other boys. I'd never allowed any homosexual programs on the television, I monitored his reading material to be sure that it was always clean, and when describing sex to him, I'd never even hinted that it was possible for men to be attracted to one another. I always stressed that when a MAN loved a WOMAN...

How was it possible that my son was gay? HOW? Was it because I was the only parent figure? Was it because he'd never had a proper mother? Should I have married sooner to give him an example of a proper couple?  
But he'd SEEN me with Satomi. Not intimately, of course, but plainly, clearly saw his father, a man, with a woman. Weren't children supposed to imitate their parents? I'd always been careful to tread the path I wanted Kouji to walk, so that he could mimic me safely as he had with my way of talking, so long ago.  
How could I have messed up so badly? This was terrible, I thought. I had to correct this immediately.

"Kouji...little boys don't love other little boys," I finally said, struggling to remain calm and conversational.

He was expecting this reaction. "That's what everyone else says too; Mitsuwa-san says if she catches us being 'publicly affectionate', she'll call home on us. But we like each other." He looked pleadingly at me. "Daddy..." He never called me "Daddy" anymore; he was too much of a man for that. But he knew it always got to me, and so he used it in desperate situations. As a parent who'd never expected to even be recognized by their child, to be called "Daddy" was a wonderful treasure. "I just...I love him. I know it's weird, but I feel it in my heart."  
"You don't love someone at ten years old," I told him, perhaps a little too sharply. He looked a little hurt, and I knew I was definitely to blame. I'd always treated his crush so seriously; he must have begun to believe that real love felt this way, and it just didn't. "Perhaps you really like this boy and he's your best friend, but you don't love him."  
"I really do," he insisted, and I almost believed him. All this time he'd been acting like a normal child with a normal crush. He'd never once hinted that this innocent love was directed towards another little boy, and if he hadn't told me, I never would've expected it.

But I just couldn't accept this. It didn't even seriously register with me that he could be really in love; obviously that wasn't even a possibility. He just had to be confused, that's all. Yeah, that's all. He couldn't even know what real love felt like, and he couldn't possibly love this boy anyway, not when he was also a boy. So it wasn't real.  
"Listen...Kouji..." I hid my face in my hands. I took deep breaths. My son was still the same boy he'd been five minutes ago; he was just a little confused is all. He valued friendship so much more than other children because he'd been alone for the first six years of his life. He was just overestimating strong friendship. All I had to do was take a deep breath and be calm.

"Do you hate me?" he said quietly. He was trying gallantly not to cry. "The other kids think we're weird; some of them hate us too."

"No, no, I don't hate you! God, no..." One more calming breath. If Kouji was so upset that he thought I hated him, I had to make this right as soon as possible. I would not think any less of my son just because of a silly misunderstanding. "It's just that boys don't belong with other boys, do you understand? It's wrong; it's not normal. Boys love girls."

"I don't like girls though," he said, still sounding distressed. He took a little sobbing gasp; he hated feeling like he was letting me down. Even now, he was so critical it edged on self-loathing whenever he felt he'd made a mistake.  
"A lot of boys don't like girls at your age. You're...young, and still a little immature. But you haven't done anything wrong," I tried to explain, ineffectively. He was looking at his untouched food, and I saw a little tear fall. "It's just that you're a little confused. You've just gotten off track a little. By next summer, you'll realize you don't love Takuya at all, and next year, the girls will start puberty too. Then you'll realize who you're really attracted to."  
"But," he tried to interrupt again, and I firmly told him,  
"No buts. Just trust me, okay? I'm not going to punish you or anything and I'm not disappointed in you; I just want you to understand, okay? Come on, don't cry. You're getting too old to cry." He sniffed loudly and promptly cleared his throat, determined not to do anything else that would potentially disappoint me. "I love you. I trust you. I know you'll figure it out. You're a smart kid; I know you know what's wrong and what's right."  
"Yes, Father." His sudden transition of "Daddy" to "Father" didn't go unnoticed. It hurt me, hard, like being stabbed in the chest with a blunt knife.  
Needless to say, Kouji did not have his little sleepover with Takuya.

Kouji was upset over the issue for days, and he was positive I was still angry at him for telling me about his crush. It took a lot of convincing before he believed that I really wasn't mad. And I wasn't, honestly. I'd convinced myself that this really was nothing. Even if I'd accepted it in my back of my mind, on the surface I still refused to believe that it was really happening to me. My son wasn't gay, it simply wasn't possible. It would all be okay if we all just ignored it for a while and Kouji eventually figured out that he DID like girls, not this boy named Takuya. I didn't even acknowledge girls until my early teens; Kouji was sure to start noticing them soon given his rapid maturity. I was certain; there could be no mistake. It was unthinkable that my son that really gay.  
Kouji didn't mention his crush for a time after that, but I still begrudgingly had to acknowledge that they were "together," or as together as two little gay boys could be. I made up excuses to never allow his little crush over, but I finally ran out of them. I never lie to my son, so when he finally asked if there was any real reason Takuya couldn't come over and play, just PLAY, he stressed, I finally gave in.

I knew my son wasn't girly; really, aside from occasionally being childish, he was far from it. So I figured that this boy must be ultra feminine; I figured that in a gay relationship, there was the man, and the man who pretended to be a woman. This wasn't like that at all. Takuya looked like a normal little boy; he was a little tall for his age, had a very boyish hairstyle and cuts and bruises from adventuring, and he talked as though he already thought he were a man, even though it was clear he hadn't begun puberty like Kouji had, just by the pitch of his voice.  
They looked like your regular pair of boyhood friends; they were a little rough with each other, they talked loudly and overconfidently and tried to beat each other out in everything they did, as if everything in life was a big competition that they stubbornly always had to win at.  
One thing that I noticed in particular was that Kouji stopped acting like a child around Takuya, like he did at home. It was like when in my company, his clock went back three or four years, and in Takuya's company, he fast-forwarded to a serious adolescent. He was almost a little _too _serious, and it was hard for me to believe that he was still just a child.  
However, thankfully, they didn't treat each other like they were a couple, and I was assured; I relaxed. Surely this was just very strong friendship that Kouji was mistaking for love. Maybe Takuya didn't even realize how Kouji felt for him; maybe all these things that Kouji thought were things you do with someone you love was just normal play for Takuya.

Except...when Takuya went to leave, right in front of me, he leaned in, very innocently pecked Kouji on the cheek, and said, "I like you very much," pure as intentions can be. Kouji was beaming like Christmas had come early.

I sat down with Kouji that night as he got himself into bed. Out of habit I almost tucked him in, and he shied away from me; he was striving to be independent.  
I talked to him for a good half hour, trying to calmly explain why it was wrong for two boys to be in love. I had to finally meet the problem head on and really get it through to him why I couldn't let him go on with this.  
"Why?" he kept asking, no matter which way I tried to explain it. "Why is it really such a problem?"  
"Because it's just wrong," I'd keep saying. "Boys belong with girls."  
"But why?" he stressed. He wanted a better answer. "Why is it a rule that boys HAVE to love girls?"

"Because boys don't belong with other boys; boys love girls because eventually, they want to make babies with them, remember?"  
"So I can't love you because I'm a boy and you're a man?" Again, Kouji's reasoning at his age amazed me.  
"Honor thy father and mother," I told him. Though I'd never said anything like it before, I figured he would think it was ultimately wise; I'd never formally introduced him to the Bible. But he surprised me very suddenly by saying,  
"Do you believe in God?"  
I was taken aback; religion was not really a strong suit in the household, although at this particular moment, I was wishing vehemently it was. Maybe if I'd instilled better belief into him, he wouldn't be this way. "Of course I believe in God."  
"God says to love everyone," he said, very matter of factly, like I'd never even heard of Him before. "God wants us to be happy. He did everything for us. God doesn't say it's a sin for a boy to love another boy; He'll just be happy that we're happy. God won't send me to Hell for being happy." He grinned. "Just like He won't send you to Hell for having sex with Satomi-san before marriage." He seemed very pleased when I gaped at him, speechless and a little embarrassed. Kids are a little more observant than you give them credit for, unfortunately. "I think God is flexible."  
"God created Adam and Eve," I began, and he finished for me:  
"Not Adam and Steve. I've heard that one before." He settled into his bed, and closed his eyes. "G'night, Dad," he said, not having absorbed a word I said.  
That pretty much was the last I ever saw of Kouji, my little boy. Kouji the teenager was setting in.

After that, Kouji began rapidly changing. He was no longer an innocent child; there was nothing playful or pure about him, especially after I finally did ask for Satomi to marry me.  
Ironically, though I'd wanted to keep him all to myself, I now shared my son with Satomi, and he didn't want anything to do with her.  
"She's not my mother," he'd say harshly, and boy, did it sting. I thought he liked her; it turns out he didn't. "Why did you marry her? She's a dipshit." Kouji also quickly gained a bit of an attitude and a rather awful mouth, for inexplicable reasons. The temper I could understand since he'd always had a short fuse as a child, but the swearing? I had no idea. "I don't need a mother; I've never needed a mother. Why would I want one now? We were fine as we were." Even though he said that, as though he would prefer for us to still live together, just him and I, he started avoiding me. He gave me dirty looks when I entered his room, and he tuned me out a lot.  
I figured he was just being a teenager, but at eleven, this degree of attitude seemed pretty severe, especially when not a year ago, he'd been a pretty easy-going kid. It was such an abrupt change I could barely even fathom how it had come about. Could this vicious kid really be my sweet little boy?

I didn't get where he was pulling all of this from. I asked him if there were problems at school; he said no. I asked if I'd done anything to upset him. He sneered at me for a moment, and then also said no.

Takuya seemed to be the only person to bring out a smile in him. Unfortunately, he'd entered the fifth grade still with the idea that he had a crush on this boy, and I couldn't shake it off of him. I'd been hoping that seeing his father in a normal relationship with a woman might wake him up a little, and it didn't. Teachers told me they were never inappropriate, but they did pretty much guarantee some teasing from the other kids whenever they sat together, holding hands. That is, until Kouji started tearing into them. Being violent at school was something I would not tolerate, and they wouldn't either. I wasn't going to let him mess up his permanent record because his little gay problem was causing him to act out.  
I tried to explain it to him again, except this time it was even harder. There were no shameful tears or no philosophical theories about God; just nasty backtalk.  
"How do you know who it's possible to love? It took you _years _to find another woman, and she isn't even the right one!"  
"Boys don't love other boys; that's all there is to it."  
"Is that ALL you can say? You sound like a yappy parrot."

Kouji completely and utterly ignored women, like they meant nothing to him; not just sexually, but just in general. Women _were_ nothing to him. When I allowed him to watch an R rated movie for the first time, there was a scene in which the attractive female lead took a shower, revealing some parts of her I ordinarily wouldn't have wanted my child to see, but had instead sought out, hoping for a reaction. Maybe if Kouji was even remotely sexually attracted to a woman, he would realize that he really DIDN'T love Takuya and he most certainly wasn't gay. Instead he was completely indifferent to it, (no reaction at all to the woman's nudity, though I think he rolled his eyes) and afterwards, in his personal review of the movie, the word he decided to use for the female lead was "slut." I was beginning to think he was using language like this just to draw a reaction out of me.

Kouji found no sexual appeal to women at all. None. And I couldn't understand how this was possible, because I was convinced that ALL men were on some level attracted to women. I decided that Kouji must just not be sexually mature enough to understand desire; early puberty just meant that his body was a little further along than normal, but that didn't mean his mental and emotional state had advanced as well. I kept telling myself that by next year, Kouji would realize that women were extremely desirable, and he once he realized Takuya offered nothing to that end, this would all stop.

Unfortunately, this hope was brought to a dead end one night, when Kouji woke me up a little past midnight. He acted extremely embarrassed, and he was very uncomfortable with talking to me, especially in front of Satomi. He finally managed to lead me away, alone, and he brought me to his room. Finally he told me, totally and completely ashamed of himself:

"I think…I think I had an accident."

I couldn't believe what he was saying. He was eleven; he hadn't had an 'accident' since he was six years old.

"You wet the bed?" I asked incredulously.

"I think…I'm not really sure." It was at that point I realized that his pajama bottom didn't match his top; he'd already switched out of whatever he'd gone to bed in. While he'd come into the habit of always having a stern and serious look on his face, he looked very childish and vulnerable again. He was also defensive, like he thought I was going to go off on him for this for some reason.

He stood in the doorway, arms crossed and looking away, while I went in his room to investigate. I found the matching pajama bottoms and a pair of briefs on the floor. His rumpled bed didn't hold many clues except for a small wet spot, but the pajamas did. The crotch was wet and sticky, and when I touched it, I realized (with some disgust, since it was now on my fingers) that it was semen.

Kouji was still standing behind me, looking exceptionally nervous and shaken, like he was expecting that he'd get in trouble for this. So that I didn't alarm him I wiped my hands off as nonchalantly as I could, and began pulling the sheets off of his bed.

"Well, come on. Let's remake your bed." He was silent for a moment, then he asked:  
"You're not mad at me?"

"No, no," I said, even as I had to lift his used underwear and roll it up with the sheets. Gross, but part of parenthood. I guess every parent of a growing boy has this happen to them sooner or later. I should've expected it. "It's perfectly normal for a boy your age." Not to mention, I was thrilled inside. This was the starting point of a whole new identity for Kouji. He'd FINALLY matured and now he knew sexual desire; no doubt all of this Takuya crush nonsense would finally vaporize and he would start chasing after girls. This bothered me, but it bothered me significantly less than having a gay son.

"What was it?" He followed me along as I carried the dirty laundry to the washer, and he seemed less ashamed, and thankfully, less nasty to me than normal. He knew I knew something he didn't, and he acknowledged that he was the child, and at the moment, I had the upper hand. So he was remarkably civil, not to mention curious. I was hoping Satomi had figured out what was going on and wasn't going to come out soon; this really was a man to man thing, after all.

"It's officially called a 'nocturnal emission,' but mostly it's just called a 'wet dream.' You usually have them after you go to bed at night, after you've been asleep for a few hours and you've started dreaming. It's when you have a very intimate dream that arouses you, and you ejaculate during the dream." I'd realized long ago that it was best to just be very frank with Kouji when he came to talking about sex. He appreciated clear-cut answers and straight-forward responses; he didn't want to beat around the bush with metaphors and polite euphemisms. He knew about ejaculating and semen and orgasm; entirely on accident, I'd forgotten to inform him that sometimes all of this could happen while he slept. "Sometimes you're still asleep and sometimes you wake up during the orgasm; either way, it's completely normal."

"Okay." He still looked kind of unsure, but he was a lot calmer now that he realized what it was. Knowledge empowered him. He was probably even kind of annoyed at himself, like he should have just guessed what it was based on his prior knowledge.

"And I'm not upset at you or anything, I promise." I'd gotten into the habit of saying this as frequently as possible. I knew how quick he was to become critical and self-loathing if given any reason; I sort of hoped that by constantly telling him I wasn't mad at him, he wouldn't take everything I said so personally. Tough kid or not, he was extremely sensitive. "Don't worry about it; it's really just another part of growing up. Most boys your age go through this at some point." He nodded, but then he looked at the sheets I was stuffing into the washer, and he swallowed hard.

"So this is going to happen every time I dream about sex?"

"Not every time, and this usually doesn't happen frequently." With the dirty laundry taken care of, I went along with the task of gathering new sheets for his bed. I knew Kouji could've done it himself and I could've gone back to bed, but being an overbearing father, I still liked doing things for my son. He still trailed along behind me, cautious, like he still wasn't quite sure if he should let his guard down or not.

I decided to ask him a personal question. I wasn't sure if he'd be too awkward to answer it, but I felt like it wouldn't hurt. "Was that your first time ejaculating?"

He nodded slowly, practically in disbelief. He'd known it would happen at some point, for sure, but now that it had finally happened, all the other things he knew about sex took on a whole new meaning. It opened the door to the potential of sex, plus it was kind of like closing the door on childhood forever.  
I was trying to figure out if I should encourage him to explore sexuality (as long as it was heterosexuality) or warn him not to get too carried away with this new find. In a kind of backwards way I wanted my son to lust after women, but I didn't want my eleven year old beginning a sexual relationship any time soon. It was kind of sad for me; I felt like my poor son always seemed to get the short end of the stick. He was way too young to deal with this now.

Perhaps I was looking for a catalyst to begin discussion of the topic, but I asked him, "What did you dream about?" I fully expected him to reply with something about women. Then he'd have an epiphany and realize that it was women he should've been after all along and all this gay stuff was silly. It never even crossed my mind that he would reply with:

"Takuya. We were, um…sharing a bed together, and he kept touching me…down…there…" He clammed up when he realized I'd gone completely stiff, and was clenching my teeth viciously. I didn't even have to say anything for him to think he'd said something wrong. "I'm sorry," he muttered, sounding dismal and profoundly regretful.

I just finished changing his sheets and let him climb back into bed. I couldn't think of another thing to say to him, so I simply wished him good night, and he said it back to me. Then I closed his door, and didn't talk to him again until the next morning, whereupon he immediately became nasty and cheeky to me again. He didn't even want me to bring up the wet dream again; it was ancient history, nothing to be concerned about.

Kouji never bothered me about any wet dream he ever had after that, though Satomi later informed me that he simply did his own laundry every time it happened from thereon afterwards, which wasn't very often. I can only imagine that he discovered masturbation shortly afterwards.

Ever since he was a baby, I had incredible patience with all of Kouji's antics, and even now, five or six years later, a little sass was something I could be patient with compared to full-throttle temper tantrums. But he steadily got worse and worse; his attitude and his outrageous language just got to a point...just hit a nerve with me where it finally started to piss me off. It finally occurred to me that I had the power to tell my child "No." I _wouldn't _let my son talk to me like that.  
I started punishing him. I started grounding him, taking away personal items, and most of all, forbidding him to see the boy who I was sure was causing all this trouble. Kouji's personality took a turn for the worst because of his little crush; that was the reason. I was sure of it.  
At first, he was shocked. I'd never HAD to punish him before because he'd never really DONE anything worthy of serious punishment. Really, he hadn't. So being told things like "You can't leave your room" and "You can't play video games" was a totally, entirely new concept to him, one that was grossly unfair. He'd yell at me; I'd punish him more. He'd disobey me; I'd punish him more. He never got the picture. Soon, all he had as any source of entertainment was a bookcase of novels, and when he got angry enough to TACKLE into it and push it over, I removed that too. Kouji had nothing in his room but a bed, all because of his own temper.  
At this point I finally supposed that I really had spoiled him. I wondered if any of this grounding was doing any good, or if he was just feeling miserable, and not sorry at all.  
"Kouji?" I would enter his room, after a curt knock, every hour. He'd be lying on his bed, curled up, facing away. He wouldn't look at me. "You know, if you could just tell me what's wrong, what's making you act this way, maybe we could fix it. I want to help you through whatever's making you so unhappy."  
"No you don't!" he'd yell sharply over his shoulder. "Just leave me alone." It killed me.

I'm a little ashamed to say that Kouji was incorrigible for months. He was almost never given total freedom; there was always some restriction wherever I could place it, namely involving Takuya. This began to take as much a toll on me as it did on him. As much as I wanted my son to just be normal, it was extremely stressful for me to see him constantly upset. As for him, he started cooling down a little and he tip-toed around me, anxiously, like I was just being unfair and I would just as soon ground him for breathing as I would for cussing out Satomi.

Unfortunately, even though I felt he still deserved some restrictions, I promised myself that by his twelfth birthday, I would completely unground him, after pretty much an entire year of never-ending restrictions. His birthday was near the end of July, just days after summer vacation began, and I'd feel horrible to let him sit in his room and mope without even school to look forward to. I told him this at breakfast on his birthday, and for the first time in weeks, he actually smiled at me. It quickly faded from his face; it rarely held a smile, and it was mostly cold, and stern.  
"So...I'm free to do what I like now?"  
"Not ANYTHING you like," I corrected. "You still have to ask my permission before going out, or inviting people over." He gave me another hard look. He knew that I knew what he was about to ask.  
"So I can invite friends over?"  
"That depends on the friend, and how long they intend to stay." We were having a staring contest, waiting for someone to bring up the other boy. Kouji finally took a deep breath.  
"Can Takuya come over?"  
"No." His lips curled back; it practically looked like he was snarling at me.  
"Why not?" he demanded.  
"Because I want you to spend a little time away from that boy. He's not a good influence on you."  
"He's GREAT! He's WAY better than the other idiots at my school! He's not some punk trying to get me to mess around in class or slipping me drugs or anything! You don't know what goes on in that building sometimes!"  
"And what does, Kouji? What do they say about you now? What do they have to say to convince you that being with another boy is wrong?"  
"NOTHING." He stormed away, infuriated, but intent on keeping himself in check. He had my word that he was ungrounded - for now. At this point, he knew how easily I'd retract my statement.

Satomi was unhelpful. She didn't understand what the problem was, and seemed to think there WAS no problem. My son loved another boy; my son was gay. I had to fix him somehow and make him normal again, like he used to be. All these problems started when he admitted he liked another boy; that was all I could think about. After everything we'd been through, I just wanted us to have a normal life. I just didn't think it was all that bad for a father to want his son to be normal.  
"Maybe his anger stems from your intolerance," Satomi would try to tell me, as gently as possible. We disagreed only on this; she had no problem with homosexual people. I had every problem in the world.  
"It's not inacceptance or intolerance or whatever you want to call it. I just want my son to be normal."  
"He always was normal." She didn't know about the childhood problems; I couldn't bring myself to tell her. "He'd always been a regular child-"  
"Until he was gay."  
"Until he openly ADMITTED he was gay. He didn't just come out and decide, oh, guess what, I'm gay. It just happened, probably a long time before he told you."  
"He was NINE at the time! What could a nine year old be doing with such perverse thoughts?"  
"His intentions were probably pure for that very reason. A child doesn't just decide something like that. He was so young that his thoughts couldn't have been perverse. Like any boy his age, he had a crush. That didn't mean he wanted perverse sex; he just had a crush. And it happened to be on a boy."  
"Boys don't love other boys naturally, though. I'd buy that if it was a girl because naturally, boys are attracted to girls. It's not _natural _for boys to be with other boys. Something must have happened to make him this way."  
We could go in circles forever with this kind of talk. Nothing ever got solved. Kouji was never any closer to getting better. That's what I viewed this as- another unfortunate thing in his life to overcome, like his earlier "problems." This could be cured.

Kouji had been in sixth grade for a few months, still "going out" with Takuya, by the time I returned to psychiatry for the answers. They were officially a couple now, (despite the fact I did not agree with or accept this) and from his twelfth year on, Kouji referred to Takuya as "my boyfriend," just to spite me. I realized this really was getting out of hand, and Kouji needed to quickly be shown the right way before he got too lost in the wrong way. He was too YOUNG to situate into this for the rest of his life.  
"The cause of homosexuality has never quite been nailed down," the psychiatrists would tell me as they shook their heads importantly. "Some say it's environmental, some say it's behavioral; some say you're just born that way. Some say it's a mental defect, and it could be cured."  
Mental defect.  
Those words were still so familiar to me; years had not changed the terror I felt at hearing that my son had a "mental defect." Perhaps I didn't really think it through too much, but I bit onto that, and assured myself that this WAS just a mental problem that COULD be cured with a few treatments.

Kouji HATED me. He threatened to run away; he destroyed half his room in his rage. He did NOT want to go to a psychiatrist because he was NOT crazy for loving his BOYFRIEND.  
Away he went, and throw in a few anger management classes too.

I purposely pulled Kouji from his current school. By a stroke of luck, he and Takuya had remained in the same class through elementary school, and had landed in the same home room for junior high school too. I wanted that connection eliminated. He attended a nice, quiet private school, where the teachers were stricter than usual and didn't tolerate any of the nonsense that he'd been pulling lately. I can't even repeat the things Kouji said to me when he realized he wouldn't get to see Takuya on a regular basis anymore. I couldn't even imagine where he was pulling all this anger from.  
"Why do you hate me so much?" he'd scream at me, and finally, I'd just start yelling back,

"Why do YOU hate ME? When have I ever been anything but good to you?"  
"You can't stand looking at me! You're ashamed of me just because I can actually LOVE someone you emotionless bastard!"  
He didn't understand; everything I'd ever done, and everything I was doing now, was for his sake. I loved my son, and I was afraid for him, that's all. He meant the whole world to me.

Psychiatrists said therapy was unhelpful. All he did was rant and rage that he hated his father; he hated me. Why? I asked, and they shook their heads. "He wants you to accept him," they said. "He thinks you think he's the scum of the earth because he's gay."  
That's all? I'd say, and they'd look at me questionably, as though I hadn't heard them right. He thinks you can't accept him as a person as long as he's gay, they would repeat, just in case I hadn't heard them. I don't, I said, and they looked at me like, "Well then, what the hell do you want us to do with him?"  
Kouji kept up therapy. I changed doctors, ones who saw my point of view. They understood that it was wrong for a boy to love another boy. They tried to get him to understand, and he raged at them. He was always angry, a ticking time bomb, ready to go off at any minute.  
"He's extremely violent," they'd tell me. "There might just be something wrong with him other than being gay...he could have Borderline Multiple Personality Disorder, or Bipolar Disorder." They wanted to give him medication; I was willing to do anything to change him back. Kouji was extremely resentful that I had him on medication, but I later found out that it had all been a waste anyway; Kouji mostly flushed it all down the toilet.

Psychiatrists asked me if I'd ever hit him or punished him a little bit TOO harshly; I was aghast, and of course I said no. They smiled. They said child abuse could sometimes lead to many "illnesses", but they didn't really believe in child abuse; a parent had the right to punish his child as he saw fit, as long as he didn't kill the thing.  
I told them I'd never even started punishing Kouji until recently, and I had _never _laid a hand on him. They shrugged.  
I changed psychiatrists again, and stopped making Kouji take their medication. It was one of the only things I'd ever done in recent years that he was grateful to me for.

Kouji had long surpassed his thirteenth birthday by the time I finally started seeing improvement. He was a little calmer; it wasn't as easy for him to fly off the handle. I'd made it a habit to start having quick, opportune talks with him about how unnatural homosexuality was at whatever moment I could squeeze in, and instead of swearing me out and practically spitting in my face, he listened. He seemed to be absorbing what I was saying, but he seemed like he was in a daze. Now his face truly held no emotion.

One day, he came home from school, trudging along. "I broke up with Takuya." I looked up at him, surprised. He didn't look even remotely bothered; he still just had that blank look on his face. "It just wasn't working out," he decided, and he slowly marched up the stairs.  
I was more thrilled that Kouji was finally realizing his error than I was alarmed by his emotional state. This seemed like the first step to recovery, and I figured the beginning would be as hard as it would for anyone with an addiction or an illness. But Kouji finally realized that it was wrong, and he'd done something about it on his own. That in itself was a victory.  
Maybe I'm too easy, but I was proud of him. I immediately lifted all restrictions I'd placed on him before and I went out and bought him the one thing he'd always wanted: a dog. It was a reward for finally choosing the right path; I pathetically hid it as a "things will get better" present to keep his mind off of Takuya. I knew that on the inside he was thrilled, because he'd always wanted a dog, but on the outside, he only smiled a little bit; how could you not when an adorable little German Shepherd puppy is just staring up at you with those bright eyes? But he lost the smile all too soon. I left him as he started petting the dog robotically; sort of as though he just knew he had to do it, not because it really mattered to him. As soon as I left his room, he turned up the speakers to his computer, and music came from them: sad, meaningful love songs.

Kouji's grades began to plummet. All of his courses were advanced, higher levels to keep on step with his intelligence, and he'd never had a problem with them until now. I KNEW he was capable of doing this kind of work; he just didn't care. I started drilling him about keeping his grades up, but he was still in such a detached state from breaking up with Takuya that it got nowhere. I'd been raised with the thought process that good grades were EVERYTHING in life, but I realized that pushing him so hard about school after pushing him so hard about sexuality might be a bit too stressful. I didn't want Kouji to go off the deep end and start having nervous breakdowns or something because I was always on him about something he was doing wrong.  
As a result, when he complained it was too hard, he changed homeroom and plopped down into a far less intelligent class. I knew he was far beyond this work, and _still_, he failed it too, for no apparent reason. Teachers said he just wasn't even trying, and they'd given up even bothering to encourage him; they knew they'd basically be talking to a brick wall. They put work on his desk. If he decided to do it, great. If he didn't, oh well.

He spent a lot of time daydreaming and sleeping, apparently. He didn't have any friends, and he didn't even bother joining in conversations with anyone. I discovered that he usually skipped lunch in favor of sleeping, and to my horror, I realized that Kouji also usually skipped out on breakfast and even dinner, when he could manage it.  
He just didn't have the body structure to take that. He was naturally so small and thin; he HAD to eat! This became a whole new argument for us to fuss at each other about. If it wasn't grades, sexuality, attitude, or his melodramatic "I hate everyone" nonsense, it was food.  
"Kouji," I would tell him at dinner as I watched him move the food around. "You have to eat. You haven't been eating enough."  
"I'm not hungry," he'd say in a bored, snide tone.

"But you need to eat anyway, even if you don't feel hungry. You look like we're starving you."  
"Always have to keep up appearances, don't you?"  
And the touchiest topic:  
"Kouji, are you purposely not eating?"  
"Why?"  
"Do you think you're too fat? Do you want to be thinner?"  
"Get on with it; what are you trying to say?"  
"Are you anorexic?"  
"There's just always got to be SOMETHING wrong with me, doesn't there?"  
Kouji was so thin and withdrawn at school that once, I even had to deal with child welfare, who had been tipped off by a teacher that there may be a problem. I revealed to them that there was plenty of food in the house, and Kouji had his own room full of rather expensive things, namely nice clothes. There were no marks of any kind on his body. Satomi backed me up on how well I treated him, and how he treated us in return: like shit. Then why is he so thin? I suggested anorexia; they suggested psychiatry.  
Back to the drawing board. I had no answers for a long time.

As usual, psychiatry didn't help with whatever problems he suddenly had with food, (although, again, I had to admit to myself that he'd _always _been a picky eater) and as usual, being forced to talk to a psychiatrist an hour a day turned him bitter and angry again, not to mention even LESS interested in school. He nearly failed the ninth grade, but had enough sense to, at the last minute, rapidly begin doing all his work and to suddenly nail straight A's in every subject with minimal effort. This was enough for him. He didn't care that by blowing off basically his entire junior high school year, he'd pretty much destroyed every possibility of getting a good career later down the road.  
He passed. He scraped by. Good enough for him.

He moved on to high school. Since he was unhappy in a private school to begin with and most private high schools weren't going to take a student with his record of failure anyway, I allowed him to mingle back into a public school, figuring that there was no way in hell that Takuya could possibly find him. Besides, they'd been apart for two years; even if they did somehow find each other, nothing would happen, right? Two years was like forever in teenager time. Kids changed dramatically month to month; I could only imagine how much they'd changed in two YEARS. Who knew; maybe they'd both already forgotten about each other and had moved on their separate ways entirely. Even better, maybe Takuya had gone out and found himself a new boyfriend and Kouji wouldn't even be tempted. These days kids move through girlfriends and boyfriends like a smoker burns through a pack of cigarettes, so I almost didn't even worry about it. I'd grown delusional; at this point I'd gone back to totally ignoring that my son was probably still gay. As long as he didn't have a boyfriend, he wasn't gay, and everything was okay.

Some sort of god must've been looking down on me and spitting in my direction. Not only did I discover that Takuya was in Kouji's homeroom, but the second they saw each other, _it _began again. Whatever had caused them to break up before suddenly didn't matter, and to truly complete the smack in the face, Kouji's attitude flared up even more. He began throwing up in addition to his refusal to eat, and he sometimes did it knowing full-well that I was in hearing distance. It was like he was punishing me by throwing up his food, and he got pleasure out of knowing how worried I was. I mean, anorexic and bulimic people could have heart attacks if they got too thin, or it could stunt his growth. At any second, he could faint on his feet, requiring hospitalization to revitalize him. Kouji was again a ticking time bomb, ready to collapse at any moment, or blast into more explosive rage. And he LIKED that.  
He stayed in his room all the time, curled up on his bed, sometimes listening to harsh, violent music or just staring blankly at the walls. He wore dark clothes and sounded tired and depressed all the time. I'd heard this kind of thing was just a child's method of getting attention, but whatever attention he wanted, he obviously didn't want it from me. Now, more than ever, he couldn't stand me. I didn't account this to the fact that I'd started up my gay lectures again or maybe he was stressed being in a new school; all I could think of was that he was seeing that _boy _again, and just like before, his behavior took a total turnaround the second they got back together.

One day, like another big slap in the face, Kouji brought Takuya over unannounced. Kouji stiffly declared that he was home; I was too speechless to welcome him. Takuya bowed very shortly to me, and then scurried along behind Kouji, afraid to even be here, probably expecting to be grabbed by the collar and thrown out any second now. He hadn't changed much; still pretty tall, still messy hair, still a little rough looking; a little TOO rough if you ask me, like he thought he was just some big tough guy. He obviously played some kind of sport; he was lean, and had muscle to him. Compared to how thin, weak, and sickly Kouji was looking these days, he looked like he could make my son crash to the ground just by lifting a finger.  
What disturbed me most about Takuya was that he looked so infuriatingly _normal_. My son was gay, and had been on a downward spiral ever since he'd determined this. He'd made himself an outcast; a freak. Takuya was gay, and you could pass him on the street and never think a thing of him. It wasn't fair that he suffered from the same problem Kouji did, and yet he wasn't nearly as strongly affected. I wondered what on EARTH he saw in Kouji now; they were as different as night and day.

Once I regained my composure, I decided I WAS just going to demand that he leave, and that he never show his face in this house again. I wasn't going to start yelling or freaking out or get into an argument in front of someone who was basically a stranger to me; I was just going to flat out demand that Takuya leave, and it would not be up for discussion.

However, when I went to confront them, I found them in the kitchen.  
Eating.  
Kouji was EATING.  
He was looking carefully at me, making sure that I noticed that he was eating, and that he was eating practically a full meal, too. I caught his eye, and he winked at me. Just that quick, I knew he was blackmailing me. If I ordered Takuya away, he'd stop eating and go throw up whatever he'd ingested already. If I let Takuya stay, he would eat.  
As much as I wanted to keep my son from these gay tendencies, I wanted him to eat more. I was afraid of what would happen if he continued refusing food.  
I merely reminded Kouji that if he wanted friends over, the door to his room MUST remain open. This was not a new rule; I was just enforcing an old one. He said okay. He was smirking victoriously; I almost felt like walking up to him and smacking that smirk off his face, but of course, I didn't.

Kouji started eating again, but he was strict about what it was he ate, like he thought he was on some kind of hardcore diet. He seemed a little perkier when Takuya was around, but even in his presence, he wilted a little, and looked depressed. He cut back a little on his attitude, and on occasion, if he felt like it, he did class work. As much as I hate to admit it, I'm glad there was a little improvement just by being around Takuya, but ultimately, this resulted in him becoming blatantly gay.  
Apparently, I was right about one male taking on a feminine role; they'd just been too young as children to determine who was better suited as the female. Unfortunately, shamefully, it seemed to be Kouji. He started doing subtle little feminine things; he shaved his legs and crossed them while sitting, he wore skimpy clothing designed to flatter women, (basically, he cross dressed) and he wore make-up. Don't get me wrong; it's fine for men to wear _some _make-up. I do it a little too. But he specifically made-up his face to LOOK like a woman's face, with lipstick and everything!  
And even worse, while in his room, on his bed, he would settle on Takuya's lap and lean into his chest as his arms wrapped around him, looking perfectly at ease. They weren't trying to get sexually close; they were just lying with each other, like _sweethearts_.  
He'd always had worn his hair a little on the long side, sometimes in a stubby little ponytail, ever since he was nine. However, a year ago he'd started letting it grow out, and I realized why. Now he wore his hair down, always, and if you weren't looking closely, he could easily be mistaken for a girl, especially when he curled up in Takuya's arms.

To my immense horror, he completed the transformation from moderately gay teenage boy to obnoxiously gay teenage drag queen just days before his sixteenth birthday. Out of habit, I always found a reason to pass in front of his room once or twice an hour to check that they were not doing anything suspicious. Until now, I'd always found the door open, as per the rules, and both of them interacting rather platonically with each other, other than the laying-on-the-bed-sweetheart-style problem.  
Unfortunate circumstance meant that I left them alone with Satomi for a few hours, and I emphasized that she needed to check on them two, maybe three times an hour. She agreed, absently, like she was just humoring me; I was sure she wouldn't.  
The moment I came home, practically the second my shoes were off my feet, I hurried along to check on them for the first time today. Before I even reached it, I could see it: the door was closed.

I made a bee-line right for it; having the door closed was not an option, and it was not acceptable. I didn't care if they weren't doing anything; I WANTED the door open.  
Imagine, just imagine the feeling that sunk into my stomach and burned there, like acid, when I realized that I heard soft, inappropriate noises coming from inside. There was the gentle, nearly inaudible thumping in the background, and over that, like a cooing _girl_, I could hear my son.  
I stood before the door, feeling sicker and sicker as the noises got steadily louder. I wanted to just run in there and stop everything right then and there, but then I'd actually SEE them together; I'd actually be witnessing two gay boys in bed together. I couldn't handle that.

I knocked, politely at first. The gentle thudding stopped immediately, but through the soft gasps I could still hear my son whispering inside: "Keep going; don't stop." There was a quiet protest, followed by: "Fuck him, just go." I pounded harder on the door. I yelled at him to open it. The thumping resumed. His cries got louder, as if to spite me. Against my stomach, I started twisting the doorknob, and found it locked. I banged harder, demanding that they stop. They just continued fucking each other _like I wasn't even there!_  
I started shouting; I threatened, I ordered, I swore, I promised Kouji that if he thought life was hard and boo-hoo for him NOW, just wait until I got hold of him if he didn't stop.  
They kept going. I could hear Kouji whispering inside, a steady mantra of "Aahs" and "Ohs."  
Satomi tried to pull me away from the door; she tried to convince me to just let them be. They were teenagers; they were in love. Couldn't I understand that feeling?  
I was too angry at her to even try to comprehend her words, and maybe it was an overreaction, but I yelled at her too, shouting at her to get out of my face and to keep her nose out of my son's affairs. I'd TOLD her she needed to keep an eye on them to keep this from happening, and she deliberately let it happen! And what was worse, she didn't _care_!  
Kouji was making even louder noises, and I could hear Takuya now too. There was a sudden gasp from both of them, and then, they stopped.

Kouji came out alone about ten minutes later, and he reeked of sex. Takuya would rather risk a fall from the second floor than face me after what he'd just done, and with damn good reason. If he hadn't broken his neck during the fall, I'd have broken it for him.  
Despite being left to deal with me all alone by his supposed boyfriend, Kouji was smirking, pretty pleased with himself. He was glowing with contentment; he was very confident. He laughed in my face when I started going off on him about what he'd done, what had just happened...this gross, disgusting thing that had just happened. He just laughed at me more! It was so infuriating! And then he started just talking back to me and he was insulting me in this snide, snarky little tone, like he was just egging me on, and I...I just...  
I smacked him. I smacked him as hard as I could with the back of my hand, across the face. He fell backwards into his door, and he caught himself on the knob. He rubbed his cheek slowly, sort of disbelieving, like he couldn't comprehend that I was capable of hitting him.  
I could barely believe it myself. I had actually just smacked my son; my CHILD. We both stared at each other in total disbelief; the snide, over-confident teenage glare was gone from his face and it was overcome with a look of bewilderment, and I was reflecting it.  
This was going way too far. It HAD to stop.

That's when the shouting match REALLY started. The walls reverberated with our voices and the sound of doors slamming; we were at full out war. I would NOT allow him to date another boy, and I most certainly would not tolerate homosexual acts under my roof. He better shape up or I swear to God, I'd kick him out. Not that I'd really kick him out.  
And he knew it.  
He challenged me to make him leave; he practically begged me to. He said he'd rather die on the streets than live anywhere near me. I promised I'd send him to boarding school or a military academy or worse, a religious school, if it meant he'd shape up. He teased me; he said I didn't have the balls to punish him. I'd never go along with it. Worse, he was right.  
All I could see in front of me was his face, with his vicious smirk and his beady little eyes and his smart-ass little laugh. I smacked him again, even harder than I had before. This time he came back at me, and a split second after my hand connected with his face, both of his hands were at my wrist, digging all ten nails that were like claws into my skin, practically drawing out blood. He was glaring at me like he was fully prepared to go farther than that, and at that point, I really, truly became afraid that my son was crazy.

We shouted at each other some more; neither of us would back down. Three times he made motions as though he were packing to leave; twice I made motions as though I were making arrangements for him to leave.  
An hour later, we left at a draw. Both of us were hoarse. We got as far away from each other as possible, and stayed there.

Satomi, who'd thankfully stayed out of the whole thing, was white as a ghost. She'd nearly called the police on us, but she couldn't bring herself to do it. She tried to talk me down, but I was still so PISSED...  
Kouji and I didn't talk to each other for hours. I tried going in his room around midnight that night, and the second I opened the door, a heavy boot came flying right at my head, along with this threat:  
"Try, just try to do anything else to me you son of a bitch, and I'll make sure that you'll regret it. You WILL regret it."  
I made arrangements for him to see more psychiatrists.

Therapists eventually noticed the one thing that had escaped me: he was cutting himself. At any given time, there were three or four new cuts on his arms, and a score of others all up and down, from his shoulder to his wrists. They were shallow, but were always just deep enough to cause a scar, though never deep enough to ever put him in danger. It suddenly explained why he always wore long sleeved shirts.  
They said that, when taking everything else into account, this really did just mean he was begging for attention. There was no real reason for someone to cut unless they wanted attention, and children usually did it just because they figured that it was what "depressed" people did. It was nothing to be concerned about and eventually he'd learn how pointless the action was.  
Not true! said the others. They did it because the child got pleasure from being hurt. It was a sign of masochism or mental deprecation. He was almost certainly manic depressive and he needed to be institutionalized immediately.  
No, not at all! Others said he did it because he felt he deserved to be punished. It was a sign that he was self-loathing and it was him acting out a desire to die. If left unchecked, he'd eventually kill himself.

Kouji gave them different responses each time, as though playing with them just to test their responses when compared to other psychiatrists. He hated his body and wanted it to suffer. He got off on cutting because it was a little painful, and he liked pain. He was just doing it because he secretly wanted me to feel bad. He was just doing it because he thought it made him look cool. He changed his story each time, just to screw around with them, and I never found out why he really did it. He just did it.  
I never did figure out HOW he did it either; there weren't any knives or razors in his room, or anything capable of causing the wounds. They just magically appeared.

The only thing the psychiatrists agreed on was that Kouji should be prescribed antidepressants at once. Children ordinarily shouldn't be on such strong medication, but it was agreed that with his history and his obvious depression, he was in immediate need of medication. Once again I agreed, because I was willing to try anything.

This time I think Kouji actually tried taking the medication for a little while. For maybe a week or two after he started the cycle, he seemed a lot calmer and notably kinder to Satomi and I. He even gained a little weight. Then it all disappeared and he was back to his old self, and I discovered once again that he'd simply flushed the medication down the toilet. I later learned that it was interfering with his sex drive, which I saw as a plus, but he wouldn't tolerate. He would rather feel angry and miserable than be without sex.

I wanted him to change schools again. Changing to a better school had worked once for his behavior; why not again? But private high schools were very picky about the students they allowed in, and Kouji was definitely not the ideal student, what with his terrible school career and his habit of random violence and his depressed, pity-me-I-cut-myself hobby. I went through hell just trying to change his home room, and by the time I managed it, school was out, and he was moving up to another grade.  
As though some god was just looking down at where I was and just pissing right on top me, Kouji and Takuya landed in the same homeroom again. The big guns didn't feel like changing it when I requested.

Kouji was under house arrest. He was allowed to go to school, and he was timed how long it took him to get to school and how long it took him to get home. Teachers monitored their interactions to make sure they were never inappropriate, and no kiss, no matter how innocent, went unnoticed. I had spies everywhere.  
I took away his cell phone so that he couldn't call Takuya, but I suspected he'd somehow bought his own phone with a texting plan and was able to keep it cleverly hidden. I knew they were still talking through the internet, and I could never catch him at it. He always, always seemed to know right when I was coming, and the exact moment he should exit out of the box. I couldn't take away the computer; he always made excuses about how he had SO much school work to do, and he always seemed to be telling the truth. Every time I called a teacher to confirm this supposed "project" he was working on that required the internet, they would back him up. Yes, he had to work on this project, and he would probably need the internet. The way Kouji treated it, he spent five to seven hours a day online just doing research for projects and reports, and try as I might, I could never catch him doing anything different.

I almost decided to put the computer downstairs where I could monitor it easier, but then that would mean that Kouji and I would constantly be near each other for an enormous part of the day. We'd drive each other crazy in hours.  
But one day, when he was at school, I went into his computer and started looking around.  
It was full of gay porn; he had hundreds, maybe even a thousand files, and almost all of it involved S&M. I'd grown up in a world where the naughtiest thing you could do was hide a few dirty magazines under your bed; imagine my paralyzing shock when I saw the kind of pictures and videos I discovered my son was viewing on a regular basis.

I found pictures of my son on there too, naked, tied up, and trying to look very sexy. What the hell was he thinking putting these images out onto the internet...?  
Some of it he was sending to Takuya. I went through his mail history, and only just the day before, he'd sent this enormous file to Takuya that said: "I had fun last time. Here's something sexy for you to think about until we can get together again," and all twenty-three files included him in rough BDSM poses, naked, tied up and gagged, looking disgustingly submissive.

That was the last straw. I took away his computer, wiped it clean, and said if he wanted to use it, he'd have to do so in the living room, or in my den. For some reason, this didn't bother him until he figured out that I'd deleted all of his files. All of his porn, all of his contacts, all of his pictures; gone. Just gone. Then he went _ballistic_.

We had another one of our famed shouting matches; it lasted for two hours, and in the duration, I'm ashamed to say I smacked him five times; just one good smack across the face when he was getting too nasty. Not that it made me any better, but if I can at least offer this in my defense, Kouji smacked, scratched, punched, kicked, or _bit _me seven times. I came out of the brawl significantly more wounded than him.  
Neighbors called police on us. Domestic dispute. I might've gotten nailed for child abuse if Kouji hadn't lashed out at one of the officers, still in a rage, and it became clear that the "dispute" was two-sided after I showed off my injuries. Kouji barely had a bruise on each cheek from my heavy-handed smacks while I was bleeding in three places.  
They suggested family psychiatry.  
After I was assured no one would be arrested, I told them to get the fuck out of my home.

Because he wouldn't respond to any other form of punishment, I tried to take away one last thing; I gave his dog to my brother, who was able to come by and pick him up about twenty minutes after receiving the call. He loved dogs; he already had two, and one more was just another happy member of the family. Kouji found out about it only just when his uncle arrived, leashed him up, and led him away. He didn't even get to say good bye.  
He just gave me a stony glare, said he didn't care, and retired to his room. Perhaps it's a little twisted, but I felt a surge of triumph to hear him immediately begin crying the second the door was closed.  
He later asked if there was any chance of getting the dog back. I said no. He called me many, many nasty names, but both of us were exhausted from the previous match; we weren't up for round two. Both of us were in tears when we left each other for the night.

We fought almost every day. Maybe once a month we'd get into another shouting match and slip into knock-down drag-out mode, sometimes over absolutely nothing. We'd always cry afterwards. I'd apologize like mad and try to find out what I could do to help, and Kouji would just be nasty back at me. Kouji couldn't stand me, and he put me through guilt trips, trying to rub it in my face that it was MY fault he was like this. He purposely tried to fail at school so he'd be held back, just to spite me, but unfortunately for him, his good grades at the beginning made up for his shitty grades at the end.

The schedule eventually became this. I woke up later in the morning so I wouldn't meet Kouji before he went to school. Then I made sure I was busy in my den when he came home, and he always marched up to his room. He didn't usually come down for dinner, so Satomi left him food outside his door. Sometimes he ate it, sometimes he didn't. Then he went to sleep. Most days I didn't even see him once, and we were both fine with that. On the days I did see him, we usually ended up in a mini-match, yelling at each other for one reason or another; his sexuality, school, food, his attitude; it never ended. There was always something we wanted to yell at each other about. I started taking Valium for my nerves on the days I did end up seeing him, and pretty much just prayed that today would be a day we managed to avoid each other until he started something ELSE up.

Kouji began sneaking out of the house at night, and I couldn't figure out where he was going. I caused a stir with Takuya's parents about my son going to see him at night, and was extremely surprised to hear, from Takuya himself, that he hadn't even seen Kouji for days. He was skipping school too. But how could that be? Kouji didn't have any other friends; he didn't have anywhere to go.

After a month of this, I finally staked out in Kouji's room, with the light off, waiting for him to return. I figured out that he had rigged a collapsible ladder to escape out his window, and it wasn't until about four in the morning that I saw him pitch it back up to the window, let it catch on two nails just below the sill, and begin climbing it back up. He didn't even realize I was in the room; he just slipped in, pulled up the ladder, rolled it up, shoved it under his bed, and fell on top of it with a pained moan. I waited; he wasn't moving. I finally called his name. He mumbled, but he didn't respond.  
"Kouji?" I finally called again.  
"Huh...what..." He opened his eyes. I was staring right at him, but it was like he couldn't even see me.  
"Where did you go?"  
"Who's there...?"  
"Where the hell have you been going at night?"  
"Who are you? I can't see you! Who's talking to me?" Alarmed, I flicked on the light. He hissed and hid his head until his pillow, and then he sobbed.  
"Go away...just leave me alone..."  
"Kouji, where have you been?"  
"Stop it! Just stop it!" He was really sobbing now, hard. I hurried to the bed to try and figure out what was wrong with him. There was nothing physically wrong with him, but I became extremely aware of what was happening just by standing next to him. He smelled like smoke, and not just cigarette smoke, but pot smoke. His pupils were way dilated, and his face was burning red; I didn't even have to put my hand on his forehead to know that he was severely overheated. When he saw me, he tried to roll away, whimpering, begging to be left alone. When I tried to pick him up, he started screaming and thrashing around, and sobbing even louder; he was hallucinating. He thought I was trying to hurt him when I was just trying to help him, and once, he even begged, "Don't kill me. I'm not a bad boy; I'm not a bad boy. Please just don't kill me."

Kouji wouldn't tell me what he was on, and he wouldn't tell me how long he'd been doing this. It was hard for me to help his symptoms when I didn't even know what kind of drugs were in his body, and so the best I could do was let him sit it out, until they got through his system. He cried, he screamed, he talked to people that weren't there, and he tried scratching at the air, as if defending himself against a phantom attacker. He was so pitiful, and so vulnerable. It was one of the saddest moments in his life that I'd ever shared with him; the only thing sadder might've been having a doctor tell me straight up that my son was probably severely mentally retarded, as he sat in my arms...

When he could think clearly again, hours later, he was suddenly so much different from the boy I'd known before, the one I'd been avoiding all this time. He was very nervous, constantly twitching, constantly shaking; he kept asking me to repeat myself, as though he couldn't hear what I was saying. He ate food, went upstairs to puke it out, and then came back down to eat more; he did this twice before I physically stopped him from throwing up his latest meal, and instead of yelling and screaming at me, he just cringed and withdrew, as though expecting I would smack him for it. Questions got me no where.

"Kouji, please, tell me what you did last night."  
"I didn't do anything."  
"Where have you been sneaking out to?"  
"I haven't."  
"What drugs were you on?"  
"None."

He wouldn't talk to me. I kept him home from school and made sure he didn't go anywhere. I'm not familiar with the withdrawal symptoms of any drugs, but Kouji did seem pretty antsy all day, and extra hungry. He mostly seemed to want to sleep, and after practically nodding off while sitting straight up, I just let him return to his room. I took away his ladder, and broke it as thoroughly as I could. Kouji didn't even seem to care.

I tried my best not to let him out of my sight, but he was very clever, and he always got away. To make sure he went to school, I woke up BEFORE him, watched his entire morning routine, and began calling his homeroom teacher to make sure he arrived every day. I later found out that even though he did, he would just slip away before the morning was out. Where he went, only God knew.  
He'd always come home in the afternoon and go right to his room, but he wouldn't stay. Somehow, he always managed to slip away from me even if I kept a close eye on him at home, and he'd disappear for hours; and on occasion, a day or two. I couldn't control him, and I couldn't keep him home. Sometimes he came back in as bad a shape as the first night, screaming about beetles crawling up his arms and legs and how his clothes were on fire. Sometimes he'd come home completely mellowed out, not even hearing me and not bothering to respond to me, like I didn't even exist.  
Once he came home, sought me out, and without warning, he sprung on me and punched me right in the face. He nearly broke my nose. Then he retired to his room without another word, like a zombie, as though he hadn't even done it, and when confronted about it later, he accused me of lying.

His cutting habit was getting worse. Twice in one week I caught him in the bathroom frantically sopping up blood on his arm, and using thick gauze pads and strong bandages to wrap up his wound, which was practically gushing blood. I wanted to take him to the hospital; he threw a major fit. He said he'd cut himself deeper and kill himself in the interim it took me to call an ambulance, and I believed him.  
I knew he was serious.  
Satomi and I separated, though we didn't actually divorce. She was a nervous wreck half the time with the way Kouji and I were; I couldn't blame her. When she formally brought up the tender subject of divorce, and the fact that I was about to lose my second wife really became real, it really, seriously hit me how fucked up my life had become and how beyond normal it was. And it was all Kouji's fault; I could blame myself, sure, but I was sure it was all because of Kouji and his crazy actions. He'd ruined not only my second marriage, but he was ruining my life. All I'd ever wanted was a normal family, with a normal wife and a normal son, and I couldn't have that.

Everything just got worse and worse after that point. Kouji became even more incorrigible as soon as he caught wind of the likely divorce, and I didn't understand why at first when I'd assumed he'd always hated her.  
He wouldn't stop doing what he was doing, and he was falling harder and harder each time. I felt like I didn't even know my son anymore, or worse, like I didn't even have a son. This person who was masquerading as my son was just all wrong, and everything, everything that was happening...it was just...I couldn't understand. I couldn't understand how everything had just gone so wrong for us, and for him. Why was he doing this to himself? What reason DID he have? I never had treated him bad, I'd never abused him, I'd never even punished him until he started developing his wicked attitude...I just didn't understand where I'd gone so wrong.

I didn't even see Kouji on his seventeenth birthday. I looked for him all day, I called around to anyone he might know; I couldn't find him. I did, eventually, some time the next day, find him sleeping just below his window, curled up very pathetically. He didn't say where he'd been the previous day, and according to him, he'd woken up, gone to school, and then he'd come home and stayed in his room. Then why was he sleeping outside below his window?  
Maybe he'd fallen out of bed or something. That's what he told me.

I helped him into the house. He was very disoriented, and he couldn't think straight. He kept complaining that he was about to throw up, and he just wanted to sleep; he was just very sick, that's all. I let him go to sleep. That was the last time I saw him.  
The next morning, he was just gone.

I figured that he'd be back later that day, or the next day. He wasn't. He wasn't back the day after that either. I was worried; I was terrified. I called the police to go out looking for him, and once they heard he was missing for three days, they at least listened. They at least had a conversation with me, even if it was over the telephone.  
"So, how old is he again?" said the man on the phone, the third one who'd been passed the phone thus far.  
"Seventeen," I repeated impatiently.  
"Has he ever disappeared before?"  
I had to be honest. "Yes, he has, but only for a day at most. He's been gone for three days."  
"Is this a bit of a habit of his?"  
I had to be honest. "Sort of."  
"Is it possible that he's left for good? Does he threaten to run away a lot?"  
As much as I hated it, I had to be honest. "Yes, but he wouldn't actually do it. You don't understand; he didn't even take any money with him or anything. Everything he would've taken if he'd decided to run away is still in his room."

"Does he have 'bad friends' or hang out in a 'bad crowd?' Does he do drugs?"

I hated honesty. "Yes, but only a little; it's not like he's a crackhead or something."

"Alright. We'll get back to you on this."  
They never got back to me.

My wife was gone. My son was gone. Worse; I didn't even know if my son was dead. Kouji could just be lying in an alleyway, just beginning to rot, or he could be sitting in said alleyway, shivering and trembling and going into total withdrawal because he wasn't getting his fix. Satomi I knew was just a few blocks away, staying in an apartment. I didn't even know if Kouji was among the living.

I hit an ultimate low. I blamed myself for everything that was wrong with Kouji; his gayness, his bad habits, his terrible attitude, whatever fucked up addictions he might have by now, and now his disappearance, and possibly his death. It must've all been my fault. I felt like I'd failed him as a father, like all his life he'd been depending on me so much, and I'd failed him. I'd finally stopped blaming Kouji for all my problems and acknowledged the real problem: me. I had taken him away from his mother and his brother to protect him from a bad parent, and yet I was the one who had ultimately failed him.  
I almost considered swallowing a few too many Valium so that I wouldn't have to deal with this stinking failure. After all, there wasn't much left for me. I was getting on towards fifty, my gay son had probably gone off and killed himself with drugs, both of my wives had left me...it was like...what was the point of sticking around? I'd done nothing in my life to deserve the air I breathed. No one needed me or anything; I was pretty much an expendable human being. Kouji, if he was even still alive, would probably be thrilled to hear I was dead. Maybe he'd start shaping up once he realized he didn't have to ever look at me again. Maybe he'd get his life back together, if he was still out there somewhere...

Kouji had been gone for a week. When children go missing inexplicably, they're usually on the news. Apparently, Kouji was not important enough to even make it into the last two minutes of any broadcast.  
Satomi and I were pretty much ready to decide on divorce; I got the feeling she already had the papers drawn up and she was just waiting for me to give her the final "OK."  
For days, I'd been thinking of every method of suicide possible, and wondering if I had the guts to go along with any of them. I was over it. I couldn't deal with all this shit anymore; let everyone else figure out their own shit from this point forward, and just let me rest in peace.

This was why I was extremely pissed off to suddenly hear the doorbell ringing, and then I was even minutely worried. Maybe the half-assed policemen had actually gone out looking for Kouji and had found his body, and they were coming to tell me of it. Maybe it was Satomi's lawyer here to comb through the house to find anything they could try to scrape off of me. Maybe it was that god who seemed so keen on pissing and spitting on me, and he was finally just coming to actually punch me in the face, for the last time.  
The one, single person that I did not ever expect, not ever in a million years to be at the door was at the door. I opened the door to Takuya.

"Sir, can I come in?" He sounded very serious, very much like a man for a seventeen year old, like he'd grown up a long time ago. Even his face looked very serious. He'd trimmed his hair a little, but it was still a little spiky and wild, and he hadn't shaved in a day or two. It was almost hard to imagine that this grown man was the little boy who Kouji had brought home seven years ago, who'd innocently pecked my son on the cheek and then said, "I like you very much."  
"Why would you want to?" I asked bitterly. I was too drained to say anything else. As much as I hated this boy, I hated myself too much right now to try and respond like that with him just suddenly appearing and all. "Kouji's not here."  
"I know." He did know; his face was still stern, and his eyes were a little hard. I got the feeling that the dislike was mutual. "I just think we should talk. I don't think we've ever talked to each other, even once, in seven years."  
"What the hell good is it going to do?" He seemed taken aback; he didn't exactly have a reason for wanting to talk to someone he knew hated his guts.  
"I...I think it would just be a good idea. I mean, me and Kouji have been together for so long, I think my opinion kind of matters…"  
"What the hell good would it do?" I repeated louder, angrier. I'd always wanted to tear into Takuya, but I was just so upset about Kouji, and seeing his boyfriend there wanting to TALK…I couldn't say anything sentient, all I could rave about was my son. "Kouji's gone! He's gone! I don't know where he is! He finally decided to say 'Fuck you, Dad!' and he just disappeared into thin air! He could be off doing drugs or doing his little fucking S&M bullshit or he could be off cutting himself and bleeding to death slowly in an alleyway somewhere, and I wouldn't know! YOU should know, if you fucking care about him so much!"  
"I do know," he said quietly in response to all this, and I was effectively silenced. I simply couldn't reason. "Can I come in?"  
The last thing I wanted to do at this point was bring into my home the boy who had first set off my son into becoming what he was today.  
But what did I care? Maybe hopefully I'd be dead sometime in the next few hours. I allowed him in. He looked relieved, and he bowed slightly.  
"Thank you, Sir. You won't regret it."

He quickly sat in the living room on the love seat, and he sat straight up, very seriously. I just took another Valium and collapsed into my recliner. I was exhausted. I'd have sunk into alcoholism at this point if I cared to drink, but I never found the taste of beer or wine very appealing.  
"Kouji loves you a lot, you know," were the first words out of his mouth, and I felt like just walking into another room and shooting myself in the head right now. Who was he kidding? Was he just trying to make me FEEL better? If he just wanted to come in and spout total bullshit about my son just to make SURE the knife was twisted a few times before I died, then shit on that.  
"Are you crazy, kid? Do you have any idea how much he hates me?"  
"You never talk to him. You never try to hear what's on his mind. He always looked up to you; he adored you. He just thought you hated him."  
"He never WANTED to talk to me!" I insisted. "Because _he _hated _me_!"

"Did you ever stop and think about what you said to him sometimes? I understand you're very against homosexuality, but some of the things you said were so hurtful; they made him feel like he just didn't deserve to live because you disapproved of him."  
"Who are you to lecture me about making homos right?"

"Please, Sir, can't you at least be a little respectful now, with Kouji doing what he's doing?" I sunk a little farther in my chair. I didn't feel like it was really fair to point the blame at me, just for trying to get him to stop being gay. I just wanted my son to be happy and normal...  
Takuya waited for me to respond, and then he just continued. "I'm worried about him. I'm worried about him so much. I've been afraid for him for years."  
"Is that why you never just left him? You pitied him?"  
"I love him," he said firmly. "But I'm afraid of what he's going to do to himself."  
"Too late, kid; he's probably already gone out and done it. God knows where he is."  
"He _was _with his mother." That stopped me cold. Time froze. We stared at each other for a few seconds, me in disbelief and him nervously calculating.  
"What...the...hell...?"

"He was very upset when Satomi left; he figured she hated him too. This may come as a shock to you, but he actually liked her a lot too. Especially when he realized she was, you know…she was kind of on his side. And she was the only form of a mother he'd ever had." He paused again, waiting for me to respond, and I did not. I simply stared at him, gaze unwavering.  
"He started getting nostalgic and he was doing really bad, and he was looking through pictures of his mother, and somehow he found her name. He looked her up on the internet, trying to find out where she might be buried. She popped up on a list of employees who worked at a pharmacy. Alive." I just kept gaping at him, not even breathing. My heart had practically stopped. "He was always suspicious about why he was named the 'second son,' but he'd never asked; I guess he figured maybe there'd been another son that had been stillborn or something. Out of curiosity, he did a search of boys in the area with the suffix 'Ichi' and the character you used for 'Kou.'" Takuya paused and bit his lip. "Kouichi apparently took a nasty fall down a flight of stairs when he was eleven, and his name popped up in a newspaper. It used your character, he had Tomoko-san's family name, and since his second character was 'ichi,' the first son...well, he just put two and two together. And then he saw his picture…" I almost started laughing. All this time; all this time... "He looked her up and found her address. He went to see her. He knows everything."

"So now he probably hates me even more." I let my face fall into my hands, and I shook my head, shamefully trying not to imagine how much Kouji hated me now.  
"He doesn't," Takuya insisted. "I swear. He doesn't. He was alright for a couple days, and he was just staying with them..."  
"And she didn't even bother to call and tell me that my son wasn't rotting in a ditch somewhere," I muttered under my breath, and Takuya pretended he hadn't heard me.  
"But then he just...disappeared."  
"Yeah, that happens."  
"I don't...I don't know where he is, exactly, but I think I do. If he's where I think he is, then it's not very good."  
"Fine. Let him stay there and get wasted and high out of his mind until he eventually overdoses."  
"I know you don't mean that," Takuya said gently, and he even smiled a little. "I know you love Kouji."  
"How do you know? With what Kouji must tell you, you should think that I beat him and keep him locked in his room and feed him moldy bread and water."  
"Because I love Kouji, and loving Kouji is pretty tough work. He's an insensitive little asshole sometimes, isn't he?" I met his eyes again. He was still smiling, and though it was a little weak, it wasn't fake. I couldn't even believe this kid; all these years I'd rejected him and tried to force my son away from him and would be ready to punch him by now if I hadn't already taken some nerve pills, and he was just sitting there, smiling, and to my face, he called my son an insensitive asshole.  
What the HELL was this kid trying to prove?

"Sir...if you'll just...listen, for once, if you'll just listen, I think I can help you understand your son a little better. Sometimes it's hard, but eventually you can get it. He's like... a really difficult jigsaw puzzle..."  
Jigsaw puzzle. In my mind, I saw my son, age five, sitting in his room and putting together a three or four thousand piece jig saw puzzle at lightning speed, and still not talking, still like he _was_, still crying, still unable to tell me what was wrong. In my mind, he suddenly grew and grew, bigger and bigger; now he was seventeen, putting together his puzzles, still on the floor, still crying, still unable to talk to me. He was still unable to tell me _what was wrong._  
I finally listened.

Kouji never got along with other children. They didn't like him for some reason; they thought he was weird. They singled him out. He was extremely sensitive and he cried a lot, which contributed to his getting picked on.  
He never told me; his teachers never told me. I never heard about how the little monsters ganged up on him and said cruel things to him until he was pouring tears. Sometimes they beat him up. I only heard about how he misbehaved and refused to do work or became too rough with other kids, like everything was all his fault.  
Looking back, he did try to tell me once, just once, about his problems, but he made it seem like the other kids were just really annoying him. He said he wanted to pay them back by punching them. I told him not to solve his problems using violence, and because he admired and respected me, he never fought back. He was weak; he wouldn't stand up for himself.

Takuya finally stood up for him. He was no bully, and he was no tough-guy; he just started protecting him from the other kids and trying to include him into some normalcy, to make him fit in a little better, until the other kids finally accepted him. He had no reason; he just wanted to protect him. He wasn't sure why.  
Takuya was his guardian angel, Kouji said. That's when he developed the crush on him. Apparently, Takuya realized that he also liked him, and that was why, instead of falling in line with the others and treating him like an outcast, he'd wanted to help him. They, as two little nine year old boys, fell for each other.  
This subjected them to more torment as soon as it got out. Two boys together? Disgusting. It was even weirder than liking a girl.

Kouji began getting picked on again, and Takuya was included in it too; everyone thought that it was only right to pick on two little gay boys who were weird. Kouji never once told me about the terrible, harmful things they said to him just because he was gay.  
"You never listened," Takuya told me.  
Kouji was devastated to find out how set I was against homosexuals. He was terrified that I hated him now, and the day afterwards, he tried to break it off with Takuya. Takuya didn't listen; he kept at it, and said that one day, he'd come in and charm me, so that I'd have no reason to be against them. He believed that one day, everything would be so simple.  
Still, when I rejected Takuya, he was deeply hurt. He cried. He was very upset about it. He wanted me to understand what Takuya meant to him, but he couldn't find a way to tell me, and he became frustrated, just like before, when he was a silent wild child. He was frustrated that he loved someone and no one accepted it, and he was angry that his father didn't accept him. He started lashing out at school more, and instead of Takuya protecting him, he was the one staving off their cruel words, while Takuya stood behind him, waiting to catch him when he fell again from distress, his anger went out, and he had nothing keeping him going.

I kept telling him how wrong it was. I kept trying to convince him that his behavior was abnormal. I kept trying to keep him from feeling love for the only other person in the whole world that he cared about. He was ashamed of himself for loving Takuya, but now that he thought I hated him, he turned to him for solace, which, according to me, was wrong. For him, it was like me telling him it was wrong to feel happy with someone for once, and that he shouldn't be allowed to feel comfort in a world where he felt hatred all around. He should just be cold to protect himself from all the cruelties of the world, and rely on no one, especially not his gay boyfriend.  
He broke up with him after finally conceding that it was the only thing he could do, the only thing that would make him feel normal. He flat out told Takuya, loudly, to his face, that he didn't like him anymore and didn't want to be with him anymore, because it was wrong.

But that left him with no one to fall back on.

He crashed. When his anger burnt out, he had no push. He had nothing keeping him going. Suddenly, things like school just didn't matter. What was the point, he figured? Compete against a bunch of other kids and HOPE you graduate with a decent enough school record, and HOPE a college accepts you and HOPE you get a decent job?  
Kouji couldn't deal with that. He had no hope, so he didn't even try. He never once attempted to tell me how helpless he felt, and how useless he felt as a person, like I do now.  
"You never listened," Takuya gently told me.

And yet, still, Kouji still wanted his father to love and accept him. He yelled at me, he called me horrible names, he screamed at me...all in his own frustration. I once again forgot that Kouji was a mirror. If he sensed disapproval and dislike, he reflected those feelings. No matter what, he couldn't deny who he was, as a person. He felt that his homosexuality made up the core of his very existence. It made Kouji Kouji, and who was he to tear away that core essence?  
Apparently he used to pray before things got really out of hand. His only request was that whoever was at work in the universe, God or whoever else happened to be running the show at the moment, would make him normal. Takuya said it was the only thing he wanted for a long time, and when years went by and he was never any more "normal," that's when he gave up believing in anything.  
I never understood. Kouji didn't really have a choice in how he felt about men, and I think I understood that now. I was sure that if he did have a choice, a choice that wouldn't leave him even more broken than he already was, he would have taken it without a second thought. But he didn't.

Kouji resented the psychiatrists because they indicated not only that I thought he was especially abnormal, but because it meant that I thought he was crazy. It was just the principle that bothered him, not the actual psychiatrists themselves. Shrinks were for crazy people with problems, and the only reason I was sending him there was because he was gay.  
Did that really mean he had a problem?  
Food lost its appeal for him, truly. He wasn't refusing to eat just to spite me; he stopped eating because he didn't get any pleasure or enjoyment out of it. Food just didn't matter to him, just like school didn't matter to him. Nothing mattered to him until Takuya came back into his life again.  
He pitifully tried to ignore him at first, but in no time at all, he was falling onto his shoulder and crying on him again, and Takuya let him. Even now, two years later, Takuya seemed to be the only person in the world who _listened _to him, and heard his problems, crystal clear. Takuya was worried for him, and he still cared for him. Kouji probably no longer cared about silly things like love, but he liked the fact that he had someone who could comfort him, and so he took him back, just so he had someone to fall on. Takuya admitted, and was fully aware, that Kouji was using him and taking advantage of him. He wasn't truly sure if Kouji still loved him or not; it wasn't really about love anymore, not to Kouji. It never even occurred to me that Takuya was caught up in my son's out-of-control life, and that rather than instigating any of it, he was just being dragged along for the ride.

Takuya did not know why Kouji suddenly decided to become some sort of cross dresser. He just appeared that way one day, and when questioned, he simply stated that he felt better this way.  
S&M was Kouji's deal, and Takuya just went along with it, because it made him happy. I'd had images of this horrible gay torture-fetish dominant Takuya physically threatening and forcing my son to submit and take his twisted desires, when in reality, he was mostly an unwilling party. Kouji, in his own perverse way, felt like he should be punished for being gay, and what better punishment to receive than the punishment from his own gay boyfriend?  
Sex was also instigated by Kouji. I guess he felt like in order to finally acknowledge his sexuality, and possibly to ultimately piss me off, they had to have sex. Takuya just followed along, because he loved him, and he would do anything to make him happy. Sex was the one thing Kouji didn't seem to feel bad about.  
Cutting began shortly afterwards. Kouji never showed off his wounds or really told anyone about them; Takuya just happened to notice them during sex one day. He said he didn't know why he did it; he just sort of liked it. Maybe it was just another branch off of his masochism.  
"I don't think he really was a masochist," Takuya told me. "He just didn't really fit the mold for it. He took pain like he was repenting for his sins, and that's why he felt better afterwards. Maybe that's why he liked sex too...he always wanted it to be really rough and painful for him."

I didn't understand why Kouji felt so resentful to himself, so self-loathing. He'd always outwardly made it like he loved who he was: a gay man. I was just the one with the problem.  
"You never listened," Takuya muttered to me again. "He was practically stewing in his own self-hatred. He still felt so sick for being gay. He even yelled at me a few times, shouting at me like it was my fault we were abnormal..."

Kouji seriously began contemplating suicide. He would use it as a threat against Takuya to get what he wanted; sex, pain, whatever. His cuts became more focused, and more dangerous. The saying is that to really hurt yourself, you go "down the highway," or rather from your elbow to your wrist, long ways, and that the pitiful, nonsense cutting was going "across the street," or short ways across the wrist, etc. Kouji seriously began slicing up his arms, just to bleed himself out. The more blood, the better. Takuya couldn't get him to stop, and it was around this point that Kouji started letting him slide out of his life again. There were days that Takuya almost had a nervous breakdown just from worrying himself sick over whether or not Kouji was dead; he always left off conversations as though it were the last time he'd ever be talking to him.  
Kouji really did almost kill himself on two occasions: the first time I smacked him, and when I gave away his dog. That had hurt him so much deeper than I could ever have imagined.

He picked up smoking not long after I took away his computer. Again, he had no reason for it; he just decided that he wanted to do it. He didn't care much for drinking, but smoking cigarettes eventually evolved into smoking pot. After that, weed eventually moved onto...other things.

"God knows where he got all that shit he put into himself," Takuya said bitterly. "I can't even name all the shit he tried, just for the hell of trying it. Meth, coke, dope, X, shrooms, maybe even acid. God knows."

When I started glaring at him, he continued: "Seriously, after everything I've been saying, do you really thing I'm the one who turned him onto drugs?" I shrunk a little.

"Kouji has…friends," Takuya said stiffly. "People who give him what he wants in exchange for other things."

"Like what?"  
"Well, Kouji's always been very aware that he has a very nice body." I swear, for a split second, my heart actually stopped. I was sure that Kouji was going to give me a heart attack before the night was out. "He doesn't have much money left. Apparently he's been stealing some of yours when he can take it, but the rest he just pays in sex. The first time he did it, I couldn't bring myself to touch him afterwards, and then he just…rejected me. He said there was no reason to keep me around. Why would he even want to give me sex for free when he could give other people sex for his fix?"  
"When?" I whispered.

"Week or two ago, I guess." Takuya finally started to lose the coolness he'd been trying to keep up ever since he came here, and he wiped his eyes on his sleeve. "He doesn't even talk to me anymore. That's why I don't know exactly where he is, because I haven't spoken to him, but I have a guess…"

"He's with his 'friends,' right?"  
"Probably. I think that's why he left his mother and his brother in the first place; he couldn't stay with them because he was craving his fix. And I just...I didn't know what else to do anymore; I didn't think you could help, but I had to try. You're the only person I could think of to go to. And he's…I don't know. I think he plans on overdosing. That's what he used to talk about; the finer points of getting high, the exact science of it, to ensure that you enjoy the high but you're not putting yourself in any 'danger.' He knows exactly how to kill himself with an overdose. That's just about the last thing he said to me: 'And you don't even feel death. You just feel the ultimate high, because impending death is the high.'"

I got out of my chair. Tears had started coming down Takuya's face now, and he looked up at me, confused, when I moved so suddenly. "What are you doing?"  
"You said you have a pretty good idea of where he is, right?"  
Takuya wiped his eyes on his sleeve again. "I might. I mean, he might not be there…"

I pulled him out of the chair by his shirt collar and held him to my face; he didn't resist in the slightest, he just stared expectantly at me. I glared at him hard, trying to keep my anger in check, trying not to let it out on this boy. This man; who I'd been judging very wrongly all this time. "Listen to me. You are going to either tell me or take me to where my son is, and if we don't find him, you are going no where until we do. If he won't listen to me, you will help me FORCE him to come home, and we will stop this from going any farther than it has. Do you understand?"  
"Do you want him home?" he asked. "Is he welcome here? Do you really want Kouji back?"  
"I want my _son_ back. And I don't care if he does come home a homosexual drug addicted whore; I don't _care_. I want my son _home_."  
He tried to grin. It didn't work out very well. "Thank you."

It felt like seconds had passed by the time me and Takuya had reached me car. He was hesitant to get in the passenger seat. "Are you sure you should be driving? Maybe I'm a little calmer than you are right now…"

"Get in the fucking car and tell me which direction I pull out into."  
He got into the car, and said: "Left."

Maybe Takuya was right. My nerves were shattered at this point and I felt like I needed another Valium, even though by now I should have lapsed practically into a coma. I was gripping the wheel as hard as I could, and I was so tense, clenching my teeth-

"Right here."

It took me a minute to acknowledge that Takuya had just given me another direction. I almost missed the turn and jerked the wheel hard to the right; the tires screeched in rebellion, but we made the turn.

"It'd probably go faster with me knowing the way already, right? So I should probably drive…"

"What next?" I growled between clenched teeth. My foot was getting a little heavy on the gas pedal; the speedometer was gaining on fifty, which wasn't exactly safe in a suburban area.

"Uh, about half a mile up, another left."

The speedometer was at fifty-five. Sixty. Sixty-five.

I think the car tilted a little bit when I made that next left.

Takuya just cleared his throat and promptly put his seatbelt on. His hands were visibly shaking.

"You're just like Kouji," he told me, and the car was edging back up to fifty-five again; I didn't trust myself to take my eyes off the road. "Kouji is a horrible driver. He wants to get where he wants to go ASAP, and he's pretty…um…reckless about it."

"At least he learned something from me," I muttered.

"I'd have rather he learned something else…"

I drove like a bat out of hell. Quite literally, I felt like a flying creature of some sort trapped in a very small house; we seemed to be going at rocket speed and had to know just when to turn to avoid hitting a wall, or in my case, a car. I made very narrow misses, and I think I shaved a few years off of my life and Takuya's.  
I couldn't help it. I couldn't stop. I think you could say I was spinning out of control, but what did that matter? Kouji had _been_ spinning out of control, and the only way I could stop him was by racing to him. If I could just get to him before he stopped spinning at all…  
If I could DO something RIGHT for my son, for once in my life...

"Left," Takuya squeaked. "LEFT!" he said louder, when he realized I hadn't paid any attention to him.

"LEF-"

"I'm turning left!" The car managed to complete the turn, but then it stalled, so suddenly it took me a moment to figure out why my heavy foot wasn't TAKING us anywhere. It, among many other things, wasn't very happy with me.

"Come on, come on…" It roared back to life, and with my foot already pressing hard down on the pedal, we were immediately speeding off again.

"Talk to me. Say something." Takuya didn't find this to be a strange request at all.

"Talk to distract you?" I nodded shortly. "Kouji liked the same thing. It didn't matter what was said; he just liked senseless chatter to fill the silence."

"Then talk."

"I'm afraid of accidentally saying something that'll make you want to crash the car." As much as it pained me, I forced my stiff foot off the gas pedal, a little too abruptly. The car slowed to fifty. Forty-five.

"How much longer?"  
"Not long; maybe five minutes."

"Can you tell me something?"  
"As long as I don't puke, sure."

"What…what does Kouji say? When he talks about me?"

Great dad…supportive dad…loving dad…Dad…a word I hadn't heard for a long time, a word that had become almost foreign to me.

Emotionless bastard…son of a bitching gay basher…burn in hell for all the things he's done to me…yeah, that's more familiar.

Wish he understood, wish we could get along, wish we could be father and son, wish we had a nicer relationship…

Wish he didn't feel like I wanted to kill him…

"Stop, stop, STOP!"

I jammed on the brakes; Takuya was lucky he had his seatbelt on, because I rammed my chest into the steering wheel. I was starting to wonder if tonight I WANTED to have a heart attack.  
Takuya looked white as a ghost.  
"Why? What? I wasn't going to hit anything, was I?"

"We're…here…Kouji should be here." He shakily turned his head to look out the window and reached to open the door, and he froze. I was about to ask if he saw anything, and before I could, eh said in a low, quiet voice, I heard him say, "Oh, no."

I threw open the door and jumped out of the car; the street was completely and totally dark, and I could barely see a thing of the dingy little neighborhood. But I didn't even have to get all the way around the car before I saw what had made Takuya…

Oh, no.

"This is the norm for them," Takuya almost whispered as he got out his own side, steadying himself on the car. "If they think the druggie is going to die, they just literally 'throw him out to the curb.' They can't afford to be caught up in an overdose case by calling the police and..."

The door to the house was open. There were no lights on inside; just brief, flickering flames and embers. An occasional unnatural laugh. Steady thumping in the background. Smoke pouring out of the opening as though from a smoke machine.  
And my son, convulsing, as though having a seizure, on the lawn just outside the door. Naked. Cut. Bleeding. Bruised.

"I didn't think we'd be too late," someone was sobbing. "This isn't right…this isn't _fair_. Why didn't I get you sooner…?"  
Kouji dug his nails into his own chest and scratched himself, leaving bright streaks of blood. He sobbed, loud. All that blood…he'd just been attacking himself.

"I don't know what to do…it's never been this bad before…I don't know what he's ON…" Kouji scratched his face this time. And again.

And again.  
He screamed.

"Help," I wheezed to Takuya, who wasn't moving. It felt like it took me an eternity to run to my son, and when I got there, just inches away from him, he seemed so far away. "Help already!" I wheezed louder. My heart was struggling to keep going without overdoing it.

Kouji tried to look at me. I don't even know if he saw me; all I could see were his pupils, and there was no iris at all. He was just shaking and shaking, and he started wailing when I took him into my arms, as though I were hurting him. His whole body started jerking violently, trying to get away from me; he tried to flail his legs up to kick me and he tried to scratch me and bite me. I did the only thing I could think of to do. I pulled him closer to me. I started whispering to him, telling him I loved him and that it was going to be okay. I rocked him, and then I cried.

Takuya was crying too. I think he was afraid to look at Kouji, afraid to see someone he'd loved for so long to be dying, but I couldn't stop looking at him. Takuya was on his cell phone, probably looking for an ambulance; I just rocked my son on the grainy dirt, shushing him and calmly telling him how much I loved him, like a baby. I told him over and over again, even when he thrust his body up and chomped on my neck, almost trying to bite through the skin, and he started scratching my face, and wailing in my ear. He was hyperventilating. I think he was frothing at the mouth a little. I didn't know what to do.  
I was sure he would die in my arms. At this rate, I was sure I'd die holding my son.

Takuya was sitting next to us now. I wouldn't let go of him, though once he tried to take him from me, so he was trying to talk Kouji down, running a hand down his face and gripping his hands tightly, trying to do something, anything…  
And I didn't care, I didn't care if he did these things to my son with him just lying in my arms. What did it matter what he wanted to do? He was just as ineffective as I was; we were both just so useless…

Kouji was gasping. Hard. Like he couldn't breathe. I was sure his eyes would pop out of his skull. For some reason I was getting a picture of those hospital dramas where the patient's heart monitor goes flat, and all you hear is that dreaded, _beeeeep…_

Takuya sobbed again. He begged Kouji not to die; not tonight, and I finally knew for sure this was it. He'd seen Kouji high before; I hadn't. Not this bad. I think he knew more than I did when he was too far gone, when this would be the time it was too late.

But I wanted him to KNOW…

I forced his head to look at me. His filthy nails dug into my skin and drew blood. He stared at me, so wide eyed, not sliver of his enigmatic dark blue iris showing.  
"I'm sorry," I whispered, trying to pack every single feeling I felt at that moment into the apology. The monitor in my mind was getting louder, and more insistent, like somehow I knew when he would die, and there was no time at all. My petty grudges and my stupid issues and my ridiculous prejudices had evaporated. I didn't care about anything but my son. My son. I didn't care who that person was; I just wanted him in my life, for today and tomorrow and the next day and for the next thirty years or so, I wanted my son in my life, and I wanted him to be happy.

_Beeeeeeep._

"I'm so, so sorry," I sobbed. "I love you."

I said it over, and over and over again. I wanted those words to be the last thing he ever heard. I'm sorry, I love you. I wanted him to die knowing he was loved and accepted by the only two people he gave a damn about in this world.

I'm sorry; I love you. I'm sorry; I love you. I'm sorry; I love you. I don't know how many times I said it, always expecting that monotonous beep to suddenly be unplugged by one of the doctors, like someone would just smoothly turn to me and say, "He's gone," and then I'd cry again, and then maybe some really heart-wrenching music would play in the background…  
I'm sorry; I love you. I'm sorry; I love you.

I think I said it, for a long time, to a corpse. I had no doubt my son was dead. But it felt like maybe he could still hear me, and maybe if he could still hear me before he passed on, he could have some closure, and maybe he'd forgive me too…

Like maybe one day he'd come down to me in spirit, or in a dream or something, and he'd just say…  
"I love you too, Dad."  
I could almost hear him say it. I wanted so badly to hear that, like nothing else.

"I'm sorry, Kouji. I love you."

"I love you too, Dad."

And maybe, if I could have nothing else, I could finally die in peace. If I couldn't have that, now that my son was surely dead, maybe just imagining it was enough.

"Dad, I know. It's okay." My chest felt like it was imploding from the pressure. I couldn't breathe. I felt like tilting my head over and throwing up, because I couldn't throw up on my son…

But then I realized I was on my back. How did I get on my back? Where was my son? I didn't CARE that he was dead; I just wanted to hold him a little longer…

"Will he be okay?" I heard Takuya ask, and I felt like screaming at him. Of course he won't be okay! He's dead! He's dead and he'll never KNOW…

"Dad, I love you." I wanted to keep replying to Kouji, but then I realized that I couldn't speak.  
I think I'm dying. Maybe that's why I can hear my son's voice. I'm having a heart attack and I'm about to die.

Alright.

Bring it on.

It can't be harder than everything else has been. Maybe me and Kouji can even start off anew. We can try again. I'll be a little wiser this time; I know what's precious to me. I know what matters. I can see it all clear as day; I'm not confused anymore.

"Love you, son."

"Me too, Dad. It's okay."


	3. Epilogue

I heard the door open and close. "I'm home," someone called from the threshold, and I heard the dull thud of shoes being thrown on the floor.

"Welcome home," I said, and I laid down the newspaper I was reading. "How'd it go?"  
"Great; I think I nailed it. I'll have a job by this time tomorrow; I guarantee it."

"Let's hope so."

Kouji came into the kitchen and went straight to the fridge. He pulled out a carton of orange juice, and from a cabinet he produced a small glass. He shook, poured, and drank the juice all in one fluid movement, and as he lifted his chin, I noticed something that made me shake my head.  
"Of course, managers definitely hire young men who forget to shave under their chins."

Kouji didn't reply until he finished downing the glass of orange juice and poured himself more. He felt under his chin. "I promise I didn't forget; it just grew back too quickly."

"Right, like you didn't forget to close the refrigerator door." Kouji realized his error, and he grinned sheepishly. "Oops."  
Kouji often had issues remembering simple things, a direct result of a drug addled brain. It didn't affect his daily life in any significant way, but it was a rather annoying reminder of that life.

"Listen, Takuya and I were planning on going out tonight. Maybe catch a movie and then some food or something. Is that okay?"

"Tell Takuya to drive." Kouji chuckled.

"He always does."  
"I'd prefer you home by midnight."

"Sure, sure. I've got to go to class early tomorrow anyway."  
"Then have a blast."  
"Great, thanks."  
"Although I recommend you stick around until…oh, six-thirty. I heard a rumor that Satomi is planning on _Sukiyaki_ for dinner tonight." Kouji looked a little pained. This was clearly interrupting his plans. He could have dinner with his boyfriend or _Sukiyaki_, which he absolutely loved, with his family.

"Is Takuya invited?"  
"I'm sure she wouldn't mind."

"Then we'll be there."

"Alright; I'll tell her to prepare an extra place. Go on up and call Kouichi, alright? He called a little while ago; wanted to know something important about a date for a music hotel in Tokyo."  
Kouji looked a little confused for a moment, and he chewed on that information. His deduction ability was also a little twisted, but it didn't take him very long to grin at me and sigh patiently, as though dealing with a rather slow person.

"You mean 'Tokio Hotel.' The German band."

"Oh, that might've been it." Of course, I knew that; I just still liked testing Kouji with broken information, hoping to keep him on his toes and capable of simple comprehension problems even though his brain had been a little messed with.

"That is important…" Kouji frowned, and promptly did an about face. "Thanks; I'll talk to you again in a bit!" And he was off, still forgetting to close the fridge door, still forgetting he'd left his orange juice cup just sitting on the counter.  
I was still smiling at the empty space where he'd been just seconds before, still smiling at his back as he went up the stairs.

It was all so difficult to absorb sometimes, even two years later.

It feels like such a terrible dream that happened a long long time ago, but it happened. I wish I could just say here, "And then I woke up and it was all a horrible dream and I learned that I should always be accepting of people," but it wasn't. That night still feels like a terrible nightmare. I mean, my son was dead, and I was dead, and I was hearing his voice calling to me from heaven…

It turns out Kouji wasn't dead. He'd come close, but no closer than I had been after suffering a major Myocardial Infarction; a heart attack.

Kouji had been on the verge of dying for two days, constantly _almost_ overdosing, constantly coming back down without going too far. Apparently his exact science had been less exact than he'd thought. We'd just had the rotten luck of catching him in the middle of a serious attempted overdose. I think it was cocaine and methamphetamine. The brilliant paramedics were familiar enough with the address and had thought to bring a few "antidotes" for cocaine overdose, one of which was, ironically, Valium.  
Kouji regained a shred or two of sanity in the ambulance, which we were apparently crammed in together when it was obvious I was suffering a heart attack.  
I know it sounds odd, but I feel so old saying I've had a heart attack. I'm not even fifty yet, not for another few weeks anyway.

Silly, to worry about that kind of thing.

Kouji comforted me all the way to the hospital in the same hectic, desperate way I'd tried to comfort him. We were both sobbing messes.

Both of us nearly died that night. I think we could have both gladly died.

And I think…honestly, I think we're both glad we didn't.

I recovered sooner than he did. At least, I felt like I was recovered quicker than everyone else thought I was. I think I gave some of my doctors heart attacks themselves with me walking to Kouji's room at any god-awful hour of the night.  
I almost thought Kouji and I would eventually have an arguing match that would be the final straw to give me the second finishing heart attack, but we never said a mean thing to each other. I think almost dying was enough of a slap in the face for both of us. I begged him to tell me everything that had ever bothered him or depressed him in his life, and I understood every bit of it. I accepted every ounce of it.  
It involved dozens of sappy conversations with each other, more than I'm really comfortable with repeating, more than you would care to read. When he started getting upset and worrying that I hated him, I just assured him that I loved him and would always love and accept him, and when I got upset about failing him and being a horrible father, he would actually go so far as calling himself an immature and ungrateful little brat, which started me up again taking the blame off of him, putting it on me, and etc. All that mattered was that he forgave me like I forgave him for all the messed up years.  
Even about the whole "gay" thing. I'd sort of moved passed that, especially when I could really sit back and appreciate everything that Takuya had done for my son all these years. He'd helped him more than I'd realized.  
That's about the part I'd get to when I stopped and recanted if I'd just let them go along, then they might've had a nice, normal relationship and Kouji never would've ended up this way…

…and that's when Kouji would intercept me and start going off about how he really was being so melodramatic and he overreacted to everything I said and did. We couldn't stop blaming ourselves, but at least we stopped blaming each other for our problems. We'd learned to forgive each other, and more forgiveness would come in time.

By the way, even though me and Kouji were still working things out, Takuya rather suddenly became a common factor in my life. Not only was he frequently visiting Kouji during our brief stint in the hospital, he also visited me every day. He even brought me the paper, sometimes coffee.

"Why do you keep doing this?" I'd keep asking him. "Is Kouji asking you to?"

"No, I haven't really told him I've been talking to you at all. I think he's still under the impression that we haven't really met yet."

"Then why? You barely even know me, and based on what you know of me, you should hate me."

He'd just sort of shrug, like he hadn't actually come up with an adequate reason yet and it didn't really matter. "You're Kouji's father. And I've been with Kouji forever, so I guess I feel I should respect you like my own father. Sorry if that makes you uncomfortable or something."

It did, honestly. Kind of a lot. But who was I to judge him? Furthermore, who was I to tell him off simply for being kind?  
After the hospital he was allowed to visit our home, and he was usually always there as a constant support post for Kouji. Sometimes he stayed the night. The first time he slept on the couch, probably out of courtesy. When I informed him I didn't mind them sleeping together, (much to their surprise) I kept dreading that I'd hear them going at it in the middle of the night, but I never did. Either they're very quiet, or they just weren't having sex at the time.

In the end, I think Takuya kept his promise to Kouji and swept in and charmed me. As much as Kouji was a train wreck for introducing me to the life of a homosexual, Takuya was a thankfully normal ambassador. I got to know everything about him in a relatively short period of time, and I liked what I learned. He was riding two small scholarships from baseball and soccer, and attending school full time, picking up odd jobs and paying off the rest as he went along. He could be kind of silly and immature at times, contrasting drastically with the seriousness I saw from him at other times, but he was an easy person to get along with. He wasn't some horrible, terrible person just because he was gay, and he not only treated Kouji well, he treated him like a man; not like my son was some submissive little bitch. I was ashamed at myself for even considering that he might be anything but a regular person.  
I think this of all things made Kouji forgive me on the spot for everything I'd done that was wrong; I didn't just accept him, I accepted his boyfriend, and this made everything okay.

And as long as he forgave me for being a rotten father, I forgave him for being gay. Hey, a gay son was much better than having no son at all. It really wasn't such a bad thing when you got used to the idea; he was still my son and he was still normal, and for the most part he outwardly seemed to be your average, every day man. His flaming gay attitude and slutty drag queen appearance just disappeared all of a sudden, and you could pass him on the street, and not think twice about him.  
Things were all of a sudden blessedly normal.

It seemed pretty contrite, I think. Near-death experience, we cry and kiss and make up, and suddenly everything is all better.

Then came the full-blown issues of having a very drug-addicted son.

Which, I'll still add, was still better than no son at all.  
And then Kouji remembered that he hated me and that he couldn't stand how horribly I treated him.

See, problems don't just disappear like magic.

Kouji's usual hits involved Coke, usually snorted, unless it was mixed with Heroine and it was injected, and Crystal Meth, usually smoked. All three highly addictive, all three sent Kouji spiraling into rampant withdrawal after no more than a day or two without them. Even Takuya couldn't help him when he was freaking out from withdrawal. Maybe it was nice that me and Kouji loved each other again and we were father and son and he'd call me "Dad" again, but the drugs were something serious, something that would take a long time to get over.

Even two years later…

Not two minutes after Kouji ran up to his room, I abruptly stood and followed. I could already hear him on the phone. When I reached his room I gently pushed open the door, which hadn't been quite closed, but wasn't really enough open for my liking. He was lying on his stomach, on the bed, holding his phone on his shoulder while he filed his nails on an Emry board; he really didn't have any nails to speak of, as he chewed them incessantly, but nails neatly filed down did look better than nails chewed off to the skin.

He didn't seem at all annoyed by the intrusion; in fact, he waved, and mouthed his universal excuse for all mistakes: "Oops."

He knew the drill; he'd just forgotten to keep his door open again.

It wasn't that I didn't trust my son, you see. It's just that junkies don't really ever go completely clean. It was hard to put complete faith into a person to always stay away from drugs when they hardly had the faith in themselves. They fell back sometimes…

At least Kouji understood now. He got that I wasn't being mean or hard on him, just insanely over-protective. I was starting to think that he actually rather liked that.

Surprisingly, Kouji weaned himself off of most of the shit he was on, as Takuya accurately summed it up, in a few weeks. He still had the self control to ignore those things because he no longer had any reason to destroy himself. He even found the willpower to keep off of Heroine, after a few months. His big issues were still old faithful Coke and old trusty Meth.

Cute little meetings and support groups weren't very helpful. Kouji simply developed his own program: he still did the drugs, just less often.  
This I did not like.

This we actually argued about. Habit, you can call it; I'm right and you're wrong and that's that. I'd moved past the "I will not have a gay son under my roof" to "I will not have a using junkie under my roof."

He'd moved on from "I can't believe you can't accept who I am" to "I can't believe you can't accept how hard it is to be addicted to something."  
And we started arguing again.  
I guess near death experiences hadn't really taught us anything…so we had to have another one.

Kouji overdosed again, on purpose. Unluckily for him, I still had plenty of Valium left over for my nerves, which counteracted cocaine overdose once again, enough to where I didn't want to take him back to the hospital. I was already facing enough legality questions from the last time; the next time Kouji went into the hospital on a drug overdose, he'd be getting jail time after treatment, and now that he was no longer a minor, there was shit I could do about it.  
He left me a little suicide note that simply read "Fuck you," which I actually did not find until after settling him down and crying with him some more.

"Dad?" he called after me as I walked away from his room. I hurried back.  
"What's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong," he sighed, exasperated. I think he thought that we had no problems at all and I really was just overreacting at the occasional drug thing. "Kouichi says Tokio Hotel will be touring Tokyo some time next summer. Do you mind if we went to one of their concerts for our birthday?"  
"Kouichi is treating you?"  
"Well, no, you know he can't, but he would if he could." I did know very well that neither my first son nor his mother could afford concert tickets; they weren't as well off as we were. "But you also know that I know that you know how I would probably get into mischief if I went with anyone other than my level-headed brother."

"You're very right."  
"And you'd get me out of the house for a few days." He grinned. I guess he thought it was strange for me to not be desperate to get him out of the house, even though he was nineteen and still a druggie. Really, I wanted to keep an eye on him at all times; I was still the ultimate over-protective parent, after all. Hell, if it came to him being thirty and still living under my roof, I wouldn't have a problem with it, but I had a suspicion that he was planning on moving out with Takuya when he gets his bachelor's. This didn't bother me either; as long as someone was looking out for him. Whether or not Kouji was an adult, I still saw him as a child that needed looking after.

"Do you know the exact date you'd be gone?"  
"Nah, and I won't bother learning." Because he'd forget it, most likely. "I'll just trust Kouichi to keep up with that."

"Do you plan on bringing Takuya?"

"Takuya doesn't like Tokio Hotel. He says that Bill looks like a shemale and he doesn't understand the appeal of foreign music anyway." This kind of bothered me. Takuya had years of experience dealing with Kouji's eccentricities; Kouichi didn't. I worried he wouldn't be able to control him.  
"What does Tomoko have to say about it?"  
"What did Mom say?" he said into the phone, which I realized he was still holding.  
I still couldn't believe it had taken him seven years to call Satomi Mom and when it came to Tomoko, it had taken him no more than seven minutes.  
"Kouichi says: 'Mom says that she thinks we should be more interested in a less "punk" band because they're a fad and someday we'll realize it was a waste of money going to see them, and why couldn't we be interested in someone who's at least cute like Kimutaku, but we can go anyway.' I don't think she cares for Tokio Hotel." So I was the only one kind of against this. Great. Time to be the bad guy.  
"Can I have the phone?" Kouji frowned. I think maybe Kouichi had heard me too.

"Nii-san, can he talk to you?" I didn't hear a response for a few seconds.

"Here." He started to hand the phone to me, and then said, loud enough to where Kouichi could also hear: "I don't want either of you saying anything mean to each other, or I might get so upset I'll have to go out and calm myself down in various ways."

He would. He'd done it before.

I had the phone to my ear, and waited for someone to greet me. When no one did, I greeted first. "Hello?"  
"Hello."

"How are you, Kouichi? Haven't spoken to you in a while."

"Fine." Kouichi was never very happy to talk to me; his responses were always stiff and robotic, and when he did have to talk to me I think he tried fairly hard to ignore who I was. As much as Kouji opened up to his birthmother, Kouichi remained aloof and distant to me. In that case, I decided not to spent any more time talking to a wall.  
"What date is the tour?"  
"The concert we want to go to in particular is on July 25th, a few days after our…Kouji's birthday."

"How will you be getting there?"  
"Train."  
"Where will you be staying?"  
"I have a friend in Tokyo who'll let us stay with him. He'll help me keep an eye on Kouji." Good for him; answering my next question before I asked. Still, I didn't know this friend, and sometimes I don't think Kouichi realizes how much of a handful his brother can be sometimes.  
I guess he sensed my hesitation about this, because he added, sounding kind of annoyed that I needed further convincing, "He's a reputable guy. Won't even let Kouji smoke a cigarette."

"What will you do if he breaks down?"  
"Valium. No hospital."

"If that doesn't work?"  
"Hospital. Call you." Kouji was grinning again. He thought it was sort of funny that we always planned for the event of a breakdown, like it was a practically unheard of scenario and we were just being overly cautious by preparing for the extremely unlikely scenario of a drug addict accidentally going off and getting high.  
I still wasn't sure about this. People used at concerts…

"I give Kouichi my official permission to keep me handcuffed to his wrist throughout the whole excursion," Kouji announced, almost reading my mind. "Of course, it'll look really weird…"

"You can call me, right?" I could just feel Kouichi bristling over the phone.

"I have a cell phone." Not the answer I was looking for, but good enough. Someone would call me, even if Kouichi made someone else do it.

"Then it's fine with me." Kouji beamed. I think Kouichi was just relieved to get off the phone with me.

"Just be careful," I warned as I handed the phone back, so that both of my sons could hear me.

"Relax Dad, it's next summer. By then I probably won't even be using."

Sure. That was what he said last summer.

They picked up their previous conversation, whatever it had been. I walked out again.

I was worrying, as usual.

Then again, I decided, this was just what Kouji needed: something normal and independent he could look forward to on his twentieth birthday. It was definitely something he needed to announce his turnover from teendom into real adulthood.

And also, I decided, I was proud of my son.

He finished high school with above average grades, at least for his senior year. His over all school record was appalling compared to everyone else, which would have meant certain doom for anyone else, but I twisted a few arms and called a few friends, which resulted in Kouji being accepted to an admittedly third rate community college.  
He attended school there three days a week. He was very responsible about it all; he's never missed a class and I think he's doing perfect in all of them.  
We had a little issue with tuition money…Kouji insisted that he pay for it himself, which I allowed, although I was curious exactly where he was getting this money from. It didn't take much effort to find out he'd switched from doing drugs to dealing them, which I put a stop to immediately. I think he thought it was a little silly that I'd be upset about him doing drugs and then upset about him getting rid of them, (when I thought about it, I also appreciated the irony) but at least he stopped before we really got into each other.

He was doing his best to find a job and was willing to work hard to earn money; he'd sold his car for drugs when he ran away, and he wants a new one, which he will not let me buy for him.

He has friends now. Acquaintances of Takuya and Kouichi mostly, but at least he talks to people and gets out with a good crowd.

He's stopped cutting himself and forcing Takuya to do terrible S&M things to him. Takuya says he's less demanding and self-deprecating when it comes to sex; he finally acknowledged that sex was supposed to be pleasurable, not painful, which I think Takuya appreciates. I did, however, ask him not to share anymore when he moved on to saying that Kouji was a lot more lively during sex and that it was now simply mind-blowing. Sorry; I don't mind that my son is gay now, but I just don't think that any father wants to envision that.

I was planning on buying him another puppy; he'd acknowledged that his old dog had become very situated at my brother's, and that it would be mean to take him away from that. I'd have to talk to him about that though; Kouji hates surprises.

Long story short: Kouji completely loves his brother and vice versa, who doesn't care much for me and doesn't really want to.  
It worked out somehow like this. Kouji had been thrilled to meet the mother that had never been in his life; Kouichi had been equally disinterested to meet his father. Kouji wanted his real mother in his life as often as possible, and Kouichi preferred to pretend I still didn't exactly exist in his world. Kouichi still openly claimed he did not have a father, while Kouji had no problem admitting he had two mothers.  
The differences between the twins were still going strong, nineteen years later.

Admittedly, it didn't bother me as much as I first thought it would. Kouji was my son, Kouichi was Tomoko's. That's how it'll always be.

Speaking of Tomoko, she also still avoids me while at the same time completely welcoming Kouji into her home. She and Kouichi are their own little family, with the occasional involvement of Kouji, and I'm not included. I don't mind, although sometimes I think it bothers Kouji more than he lets on. Either way, they seem to be doing well, and Kouichi seems to have turned out okay. If Tomoko did as terrible a job at raising her son as I did, I haven't noticed yet.  
I don't think she'll ever forgive me for letting her second baby practically go off the deep end though. I got a thorough thrashing for letting Kouji get so fucked up, especially with drugs. Not that she blames him, of course.

I'm fairly sure that she's the one who turned Kouichi against me. She assures me she's never said a mean word about me (that was unjustified, she says; cute little disclaimer, right?) and that Kouichi's feelings about me are Kouichi's feelings. Kouji's now acting as my ambassador to try and win them over, and I think his diligence is paying off; Tomoko will at least be civil and polite to me, and while Kouichi used to utterly ignore my existence, now he'll at least speak to me. Like I said, it doesn't bother me as much as it probably should; not only is Kouichi not as close to me as a son should be, I've already gone through the trouble of having a son hate my guts. So this is nothing new.

Thankfully, Satomi called off the divorce. We're still together. Kouji and I are both grateful. To this day I'm not sure if she ever would have really gone through with it; now that I stopped to look at it, I realized how close she and Kouji had gotten over the years.

Satomi only just hit her forties and she jokingly suggested that we hurry up and have a baby together now that Kouji's all grown up. At least, I'm hoping she was joking. One was enough for me, and I'm too old to go through all that again.

My son was, over all, rather normal, and we were living a sort of normal life, although it seems a little later than it ordinarily should be. I think that despite it all, we were both pretty happy. Life wasn't so bad once you figured everything out and got over the confusion of all the difficult paths and choices. So we'd taken a few wrong turns here and there before eventually figuring out the right one; I think everyone has to go through a few bad roads at some point. It's what makes life worth living.

And I, for one, was glad to be living, and Kouji was too.

I was sure that even though the future roads would continue to be bumpy and even a little treacherous, (after all, I had Kouji for a son and he had me for a father, and that alone was obviously a recipe for turmoil) we would be able to get through them from now on, side by side, like father and son should. And one day Kouji will finally mature and go out on his own and make something of himself, and I can only hope and pray that he'll look back and think something along the lines of, you know, I'm glad my dad raised me like he did. Sure, I'd made a few mistakes, but it did all work out in the end, right? Hopefully, Kouji won't make the same mistakes I did when he becomes a father…

…On second thought, no, I'd rather not think about that. Maybe it's a good thing he's gay and incapable of having children. You can just imagine that disaster gone wrong in a million ways. I'll beg Kouichi for the grandkids.

So that's it. It seems the end was a little contrite after all, huh? I guess I don't really care in the end what anyone else thinks anymore; whether I was the bad guy or Kouji was a bad kid or whether I made the wrong choices or Kouji made the wrong choices. What matters is we both know what path we're on now, and to be sure of where you're going without all the stupid, confusing things to interrupt you, well, that in itself was worth the hardship it took to get to that path.

Well, almost all of it. Like I said, I had Kouji for a son and he had me for a father, so I was pretty sure there'd still be plenty more to come. We'd just have to remember now and then to stop and pick up the pieces so we could complete the jigsaw puzzle later on, and maybe it won't exactly be a perfect picture in the end, but I think that it'll still be a beautiful one.


End file.
